From owner-bhaskar Wed Jul 31 12:18:21 1996
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 10:13:56 -0600
Message-Id: <9607311613.AA01368@marx.econ.utah.edu.econ.utah.edu>
From: Hans Ehrbar
Subject: rts2-11
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Chapter 1. Philosophy and Scientific Realism
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1. TWO SIDES OF KNOWLEDGE
Any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling
with this central paradox of science: that men in their social
activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like
any other, which is no more independent of its production and the
men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has
its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skills
and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity.
This is one side of `knowledge'. The other is that knowledge is
`of' things which are not produced by men at all: the specific
gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of
light propagation. None of these `objects of knowledge' depend
upon human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue
to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same
way, though ex hypothesi there would be no-one to know it. Let
us call these, in an unavoidable technical neologism, the
intransitive objects of knowledge. The transitive objects of
knowledge are Aristotelian material causes.1 They are the raw
materials of science - the artificial objects fashioned into
items of knowledge by the science of the day.2 They include the
antecedently established facts and theories, paradigms and
models, methods and techniques of inquiry available to a
particular scientific school or worker. The material cause, in
this sense, of Darwin's theory of natural selection consisted of
the ingredients out of which he fashioned his theory. Among
these were the facts of natural variation, the theory of domestic
selection and Malthus' theory of population.3 Darwin worked these
into a knowledge of a process, too slow and
1 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1.3.
2 See J. R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, pp.
116-19.
3 Cf. R. Harre, Philosophies of Science, pp. 176-7.
22 Realist Theory of Science
complex to be perceived, which had been going on for millions of
years before him. But he could not, at least if his theory is
correct, have produced the process he described, the intransitive
object of the knowledge he had produced: the mechanism of natural
selection.
We can easily imagine a world similar to ours, containing the
same intransitive objects of scientific knowledge, but without
any science to produce knowledge of them. In such a world, which
has occurred and may come again, reality would be unspoken for
and yet things would not cease to act and interact in all kinds
of ways. In such a world the causal laws that science has now,
as a matter of fact, discovered would presumably still prevail,
and the kinds of things that science has identified endure. The
tides would still turn and metals conduct electricity in the way
that they do, without a Newton or a Drude to produce our
knowledge of them. The Wiedemann-Franz law would continue to
hold although there would be no-one to formulate, experimentally
establish or deduce it. Two atoms of hydrogen would continue to
combine with one atom of oxygen and in favourable circumstances
osmosis would continue to occur. In short, the intransitive
objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of
them: they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and
processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the
most part they are quite independent of us. They are not
unknowable, because as a matter of fact quite a bit is known
about them. (Remember they were introduced as objects of
scientific knowledge.) But neither are they in any way dependent
upon our knowledge, let alone perception, of them. They are the
intransitive, science-independent, objects of scientific
discovery and investigation.
If we can imagine a world of intransitive objects without
science, we cannot imagine a science without transitive objects,
i.e. without scientific or pre-scientific antecedents. That is,
we cannot imagine the production of knowledge save from, and by
means of, knowledge-like materials. Knowledge depends upon
knowledge-like antecedents. Harvey thought of blood circulation
in terms of an hydraulic model. Spencer, less successfully
perhaps, used an organic metaphor to express his idea of society.
W. Thomson (Lord Kelvin) declared in 1884 that it seemed to him
that `the test of "do we understand a particular
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 23
topic in physics [e.g. heat, magnetism]?" is "can we make a
mechanical model of it?".'4 And as is well known this was the
guiding maxim of physical research until the gradual
disintegration of the Newtonian world-view in the first decades
of this century. Similarly economists sought explanations of
phenomena which would conform to the paradigm of a
decision-making unit maximizing an objective function with given
resources until marginalism became discredited in the 1930's. No
doubt at the back of economists' minds during the period of the
paradigm's hegemony was the cosy picture of a housewife doing her
weekly shopping subject to a budget constraint; just as
Rutherford disarmingly confessed in 1934, long after the paradigm
was hopelessly out of date, to a predilection for corpuscularian
models of atoms and fundamental particles as `little hard
billiard balls, preferably red or black'.5 Von Helmont's concept
of an arche was the intellectual ancestor of the concept of a
bacterium, which furnished the model for the concept of a virus.
The biochemical structure of genes, which were initially
introduced as the unknown bearers of acquired characteristics,
has been explored under the metaphor of a linguistic code. In
this way social products, antecedently established knowledges
capable of functioning as the transitive objects of new
knowledges, are used to explore the unknown (but knowable)
intransitive structure of the world. Knowledge of B is produced
by means of knowledge of A, but both items of knowledge exist
only in thought.
If we cannot imagine a science without transitive objects,
can we imagine a science without intransitive ones ? If the
answer to this question is `no', then a philosophical study of
the intransitive objects of science becomes possible. The answer
to the transcendental question `what must the world be like for
science to be possible ?' deserves the name of ontology. And in
showing that the objects of science are intransitive (in this
sense) and of a certain kind, viz. structures not events, it is
my intention to furnish the new philosophy of science with an
ontology. The parallel question `what must science be like to
give us knowledge of intransitive objects (of this kind)?' is
not a petitio principii of the ontological question, because the
intelligibility of the
4 W. Thomson, Notes of Lectures on Molecular Dynamics p. 132.
6 See A. S. Eve, Rutherford.
24 A Realist Theory of Science
scientific activities of perception and experimentation already
entails the intransitivity of the objects to which, in the course
of these activities, access is obtained. That is to say, the
philosophical position developed in this study does not depend
upon an arbitrary definition of science, but rather upon the
intelligibility of certain universally recognized, if
inadequately analysed, scientific activities. In this respect I
am taking it to be the function of philosophy to analyse concepts
which are `already given' but `as confused'.6
Any adequate philosophy of science must be capable of sustaining
and reconciling both aspects of science; that is, of showing how
science which is a transitive process, dependent upon antecedent
knowledge and the efficient activity of men, has intransitive
objects which depend upon neither. `That is, it must be capable
of sustaining both (1) the social character of science and (2)
the independence from science of the objects of scientific
thought. More specifically, it must satisfy both:
(1)' a criterion of the non-spontaneous production of knowledge,
viz. the production of knowledge from and by means of knowledge
(in the transitive dimension), and
(2)' a criterion of structural and essential realism, viz. the
independent existence and activity of causal structures and
things (in the intransitive dimension).
For science, I will argue, is a social activity whose aim is the
production of the knowledge of the kinds and ways of acting of
independently existing and active things.
6 Cf. I. Kant, On the Distinctiveness of the Principles of
Natural Theology and Morals.
.