From owner-bhaskar Mon Aug 26 23:29:12 1996
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1996 21:24:56 -0600
Message-Id: <9608270324.AA03708@marx.econ.utah.edu.econ.utah.edu>
From: Hans Ehrbar
Subject: rts2-14
36 A Realist Theory of Science
4. THE STATUS OF ONTOLOGY AND ITS DISSOLUTION
IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
This analysis of experimental episodes enables us to
isolate a series of metaphysical, epistemological and
methodological mistakes within the tradition of empirical
realism. For if the intelligibility of experimental
activity entails that the objects of scientific
understanding are intransitive and structured then we can
establish at one stroke: (i) that a philosophical
ontology is possible; (ii) some propositions in it
(causal laws are distinct from patterns of events, and
events from experiences); and (iii) the possibility of a
philosophy which is consistent with (and has some
relevance for), i.e. which is itself `in phase with', the
realist practice of science. Ontology, it should be
stressed, does not have as its subject matter a world
apart from that investigated by science. Rather, its
subject matter just is that world, considered from the
point of view of what can be established about it by
philosophical argument. The idea of ontology as treating
of a mysterious underlying physical realm, which owes a
lot to Locke and some of his rationalist contemporaries
(particularly Leibniz), has done much to discredit it;
and to prevent metaphysics from becoming what it ought to
be, viz. a conceptual science. Philosophical ontology
asks what the world must be like for science to be
possible; and its premises are generally recognized
scientific activities. Its method is transcendental; its
premise science; its conclusion the object of our present
investigation.
The metaphysical mistake the argument of the
previous section allows us to pinpoint may be called the
`epistemic fallacy'. This consists in the view that
statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in
terms of statements about knowledge; i.e. that
ontological questions can always be transposed into
epistemological terms. The idea that being can always be
analysed in terms of our knowledge of being, that it is
sufficient for philosophy to `treat only of the network,
and not what the network describes',17 results in the
systematic
17 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.35.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 37
dissolution of the idea of a world (which I shall here
metaphorically characterize as an ontological realm)
independent of but investigated by science. And it is
manifest in the prohibition on any transcendent entities.
It might be usefully compared with the naturalistic
fallacy in moral philosophy. For just as the
naturalistic fallacy prevents us from saying what is good
about e.g. maximizing utility in society, so the
epistemic one prevents us from saying what is
epistemically significant about e.g. experience in
science. To show that it is a fallacy and to trace its
effects are two of the principle objectives of this
study. In showing that the intelligibility of
experimental activity entails that the objects of
scientific knowledge, in so far as they are causal laws,
are intransitive I have already succeeded in the first of
these aims. For this means that a statement of a causal
law cannot now be reduced to or analysed in terms of a
statement about anyone's knowledge of it or knowledge in
general. On the contrary, its assertion now entails that
a causal law would operate even if unknown, and even if
there were no-one to know it. So that knowledge ceases
to be, as it were, an essential predicate of things.
The epistemic fallacy is most marked, perhaps, in
the concept of the empirical world. But it is manifest
in the criteria of significance and even the problems
associated with the tradition of empirical realism. Kant
committed it in arguing that the categories `allow only
of empirical employment and have no meaning whatsoever
when not applied to objects of possible experience; that
is to the world of sense.'l8 (For us on the other hand if
the Kantian categories were adequate to the objects of
scientific thought then they would continue to apply in a
world without sense, and have a meaning in relation to
that possibility.) Similarly, the logical positivists
committed it when arguing, in the spirit of Hume, that if
a proposition was not empirically verifiable (or
falsifiable) or a tautology, it was meaningless.l9
Verificationism indeed may be regarded as a particular
form of the epistemic fallacy, in which the meaning of a
proposition about reality (which cannot be designated
`empirical') is confused with our grounds, which may or
may not be empirical, for holding it. Once this doctrine
is rejected
18 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B.724.
19 See e.g. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, pp. 31-41.
38 A Realist Theory of Science
there is no need to identify the necessary and the a
priori, and the contingent and the a posteriori; or, to
put it another way, one can distinguish between natural
and logical necessity, and between natural and epistemic
possibility. Further there is no need to assume that the
order of dependence of being must be the same as the
order of dependence of our knowledge of being. Thus we
can allow that experience is in the last instance
epistemically decisive, without supposing that its
objects are ontologically ultimate, in the sense that
their existence depends upon nothing else. Indeed if
science is regarded as a continuing process of discovery
of ever finer and in an explanatory sense more basic
causal structures, then it is rational to assume that
what is at any moment of time least certain epistemically
speaking is most basic from the ontological point of
view.20 More generally, the epistemic fallacy is manifest
in a persistent tendency to read the conditions of a
particular concept of knowledge into an implicit concept
of the world. Thus the problem of induction is a
consequence of the atomicity of the events conjoined,
which is a function of the necessity for an epistemically
certain base.
Although the epistemic fallacy is of most interest
to us as it is manifest in the tradition of empirical
realism, it is worth mentioning that a philosopher who
rejected empirical realism might still commit the
epistemic fallacy, i.e. analyse being in terms of
knowledge, if, as in some varieties of Platonism and
rationalism, he were to define the world in terms of the
possibility of non-empirical knowledge of it. For the
transcendental realist it is not a necessary condition
for the existence of the world that science occurs. But
it is a necessary condition for the occurrence of science
that the world exists and is of a certain type. Thus the
possibility of our knowing it is not an essential
property, and so cannot be a defining characteristic, of
the world. Rather on a
20 A recent book, A. Quinton's Nature of Things, is
vitiated by a failure to distinguish these two questions.
>From the outset Quinton tends to identify the problem of
fundamental entities with that of the foundations of
knowledge (p. 5). This leads him to argue that `if all
possible evidence for the existence of theoretical
entities is provided by common observables it follows
. . . that the logically indispensable evidence, and thus
the sense of assertions about theoretical entities must
be capable of being expressed in terms of those common
observables and thus that theoretical entities can have
only a derived and dependent existence' (p. 285).
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 39
cosmic scale, it is an historical accident; though it is
only because of this accident that we can establish in
science the way the world is, and in philosophy the way
it must be for science to be possible.
The view that statements about being can be reduced
to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge
might be defended in the following way: ontology is
dependent upon epistemology since what we can know to
exist is merely a part of what we can know.2l But this
defence trades upon a tacit conflation of philosophical
and scientific ontologies. For if `what we can know to
exist' refers to a possible content of a scientific
theory than that it is merely a part of what we can know
is an uninteresting truism. But a philosophical ontology
is developed by reflection upon what must be the case for
science to be possible; and this is independent of any
actual scientific knowledge. Moreover, it is not true,
even from the point of view of the immanent logic of a
science, that what we can know to exist is just a part of
what we can know. For a law may exist and be known to
exist without our knowing the law. Much scientific
research has in fact the same logical character as
detection. In a piece of criminal detection, the
detective knows that a crime has been committed and some
facts about it but he does not know, or at least cannot
yet prove, the identity of the criminal.
To be is not to be the value of a variable;22 though
it is plausible (if, I would argue, incorrect) to suppose
that things can only be known as such. For if to be were
just to be the value of a variable we could never make
sense of the complex processes of identification and
measurement by means of which we can sometimes represent
some things as such. Knowledge follows existence, in
logic and in time; and any philosophical position which
explicitly or implicitly denies this has got things
upside down.
The metaphysical mistake the analysis of
experimental episodes pinpoints, viz. the epistemic
fallacy, involves the denial
21 D. H. Mellor, `Physics and Furniture', American Philosophical
Quarterly, Studies in the Philosophy of Science, p. 184.
22 See W. V. O. Quine, `Designation and Existence', Readings in
Philosophical Analysis, ed. H. Feigl and W. Sellars, p. 50; Methods of Logic, p.
224; and From a Logical Point of View, Chap. 1 and passim.
40 A Realist Theory of Science
of the possibility of a philosophical ontology. But if
transcendental realism is correct, and ontology cannot in
fact be reduced to epistemology, then denying the
possibility of an ontology merely results in the
generation of an *implicit ontology* and an *implicit
realism*. In the empirical realist tradition the
epistemic fallacy thus covers or disguises an ontology
based on the category of experience, and a realism based
on the presumed characteristics of the objects of
experiences, viz. atomistic events, and their relations,
viz. constant conjunctions. (Such presumptions can, I
think, only be explained in terms of the needs of a
justificationist epistemology, e.g. for incorrigible
foundations of knowledge.) This in turn leads to the
generation of a methodology which is either consistent
with epistemology but of no relevance to science; or
relevant to science but more or less radically
inconsistent with epistemology. So that, in short,
philosophy itself is `out of phase' with science. Let us
see how this happens.
First, the general line of Hume's critique of the
possibility of any philosophical ontology or account of
being, and in particular his denial that we can
philosophically establish the independent existence of
things or operation of natural necessities, is accepted.
Now it is important to see what Hume has in fact done.
He has not really succeeded in banishing ontology from
his account of science. Rather he has replaced the
Lockean ontology of real essences, powers and atomic
constitutions with his own ontology of impressions. To
say that every account of science, or every philosophy in
as much as it is concerned with `science', presupposes an
ontology is to say that the philosophy of science abhors
an ontological vacuum. The empiricist fills the vacuum
he creates with his concept of experience. In this way
an implicit ontology, cystallized in the concept of the
empirical world, is generated. And it is this ontology
which subsequent philosophers of science have
uncritically taken over. For whether they have agreed
with Hume's epistemology or not, they have accepted his
critique of ontology, which contains its own implicit
ontology, as valid.
Let us examine the generation of this implicit
ontology in greater detail. In Hume's positive analysis
of perception and causality experiences constituting
atomistic events and their conjunctions are seen as
exhausting our knowledge of nature.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 41
Now, adopting a realist meta-perspective this means that
such events and their conjunctions must occur in nature,
if science, is to be possible. But from Hume onwards the
sole question in the philosophy of science is whether our
knowledge is exhausted by our knowledge of such events
and their conjunctions; it is never questioned whether
they in fact occur. That is, philosophy's concern is
with whether our knowledge of the world can be reduced to
sense-experience as so conceived or whether it must
include an a priori or theoretical component as well; not
with whether experience can adequately constitute the
world.
But in Humean empiricism two things are done.
First, knowledge is reduced to that of atomistic events
apprehended in sense-experience. Secondly, these events
are then identified as the particulars of the world. In
this way our knowledge of reality is literally
identified, or at best taken to be in isomorphic
correspondence, with the reality known by science. From
Hume onwards philosophers have thus allowed, for the sake
of avoiding ontology, a particular concept of our
knowledge of reality, which they may wish to explicitly
reject, to inform and implicitly define their concept of
the reality known by science. The result has been a
continuing `*ontological tension*' induced by the conflict
between the rational intuitions of philosophers about
science and the constraints imposed upon their
development by their inherited ontology. This has led to
a nexus of interminably insoluble problems, such as how
we can reason from one experience to another, and to a
displacement of these rational intuitions whereby, for
example, the locus of necessity is shifted from the
objective necessity of the natural world to the
subjective necessity of causally-determined or the
inter-subjective necessity of rule-governed minds.
Now if transcendental realism is true, and
scientists act as if the objects of their investigation
are intransitive and structured, then any adequate
methodology must be consistent with the realist practice
of science, and so inconsistent with the epistemology of
empirical realism. It is instructive to look at Hume
here. One finds in the *Treatise* an eminently sensible
realist methodology in almost total dislocation from, and
certainly lacking any foundation in, his radical
epistemology. Thus one might be forgiven for wondering
what has become of his phenomenalism and the doctrine of
impressions when Hume
42 A Realist Theory of Science
allows that the `understanding corrects the appearances
of the senses'.23 Or what has happened to the idea of the
contingency of the causal connection and the problem of
induction when he argues that scientists, when faced with
exceptions to established generalizations, quite properly
search for the `secret operation of contrary causes'
rather than postulate an upset in the uniformity of
nature. 24 This is typical. There is a similar
dislocation between Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* and
his *Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science*.
It might be argued in defence of Hume that he is
concerned to show that our realist intuitions cannot be
justified; that his point is precisely that there is a
dislocation between what can be shown and what must be
believed (that there is a direct and total opposition
twixt our reason and our senses');25 and that he leaves
the latter intact. But the matter is not so simple as
this Humean empiricism is not neutral in its consequences
for scientific practice. Taken consistently, it does
generate a methodology; not indeed Hume's (or Newton's),
but Mach's For in the absence of the concept of an
ontological realm, the implicit realism generated implies
that whatever is experienced in sense-experience is an
event and whatever constant conjunctions are experienced
are causal laws. In this way our current knowledge fills
the vacuum left by the dissolution of the ontological
realm; and in so doing it squeezes out meta- phorically
speaking, the possibility of any substantive scientific
criticism. In the methodology of Humean empiricism facts
which are social products, usurp the place of the
particulars of the world; and their conjunctions, which
are doubly social products (once qua fact, once qua
event-conjunction), the place of causal laws. The result
is the generation of a conservative ideology which serves
to rationalize the practice of what Kuhn has called
`normal science'.26 Descriptivist, instrumentalist and
fictionalist interpretations of theory do not do away
with e.g.
23 D. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, p. 632.
24 D. Hume, op. cit., p. 132. Cf. Newton's 4th rule of reasoning in
philosophy: `propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena
[are to be regarded as] true . . . till such time as other phenomena occur by
which they may either be made more accurate or liable to exceptions', I.
Newton, Principia Mathematica, Bk. III.
25 D. Hume, op. cit., p. 231.
26 " T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chaps. II-IV.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 43
scientific laws, but by reducing their ontological import
to a given self-certifying experience, they serve to
exempt our current claims to knowledge of them from
criticism.
It is thus quite incorrect to suppose that realist
as opposed to non-realist interpretations of scientific
theory have consequences for science which are in
practice more dogmatic;27 or to suppose that the concept
of natural necessity is a kind of survival from the bad
old days of scientific certainty.28 On the contrary, the
converse is the case. For it is only if the working
scientist possesses the concept of an ontological realm,
distinct from his current claims to knowledge of it, that
he can philosophically think out the possibility of a
rational criticism of these claims. To be a fallibilist
about knowledge, it is necessary to be a realist about
things. Conversely, to be a sceptic about things is to
be a dogmatist about knowledge.
Now it is not only the doctrine of empirical
realism, and philosophers' uncritical acceptance of it,
that accounts for the ontological tension within
philosophy and the dislocation of epistemology from
methodology, of philosophy from science. It must be
accounted for in part by the conditions of science, as
well as philosophy. For the period in which Humean
ontology became embedded in philosophy (1750~1900) was,
at least in physics, a period of scientific consolidation
rather than change. The role of philosophy was seen more
and more to be that of showing how our knowledge is
justified as distinct from showing how it was produced,
can be criticized and may come to be changed. Thus
whereas transcendental realism asks explicitly what the
world must be like for science to be possible, classical
philosophy asked merely what science would have to be
like for the knowledge it yielded to be justified. It
was presumed that our knowledge was justified; science
was not viewed as a process in motion; and doing away
with ontology left philosophy without any critical
purchase on science. The transcendetal realist, on the
other hand, allows a limited critical role for
philosophy. For by restoring the idea of an ontological
realm distinct from science, he makes it possible for us
to say that in a particular field, say social psychology,
science is not being done, although as a philosopher he
cannot say dogmatically whether or not a
27 See e.g. M. Hesse, In Defence of Objectivity, p. 14.
28 See e.g. G. Buchdahl, op. cit., p. 31.
44 A Realist Theory of Science
science of social psychology is possible. 29 (An
ontological dimension is in this way necessary not only
to render intelligible scientific criticism, but to make
possible philosophical critcism of the practice of a
science.) Increasingly then it was the logical structure
of justificatory argument that defined philosophy's
concept of science; and the philosophy of science itself
became a kind of battleground for internecine warfare
between opposed concepts of justified belief. Moreover,
when the idea of scientific certainty eventually
collapsed, the absence of an ontological dimension
discouraged anything other than a purely voluntaristic
reaction - in which it was supposed that because our
beliefs about the world were not causally determined by
the world then they must be completely `free creations of
our own minds, the result of an almost poetic
intuition'.30
Behind this state of affairs there ran a stong
*anthropocentric* current in classical and subsequent
philosophy,31 which sought to rephrase questions about
the world as questions about the nature or behaviour of
men. One aspect of this is the view, which I have
characterized as the epistemic fallacy, that ontological
questions can always be rephrased as epistemological
ones. The anthropocentric and epistemic biases of
classical philosophy led to the dissolution of the
concept of the ontological realm, which we need to render
intelligible the transitive process of science. In this
way the world, which ought to be viewed as a
multi-dimensional structure independent of man, came to
be squashed into a flat surface whose characteristics,
such as being
29 The structure of such a critique would be as follows: If the subject
matter of social psychology is such that a science of social psychology is
possible and social psychologists are to have knowledge of it, then social
psychologists should do phi, psi, etc. rather than x, omega, etc. The transcendental
realist could thus not accept the notorious definition of economics as what
economists do. For him, whether or not they actually do economics is at
least in part a contingent question. Notice that the formula I have used
leaves the question of whether a science of social psychology is possible
open. This is important because for the transcendental realist it is the
nature of the object that determines the possibility of a science. Thus he
can allow, without paradox, that there may be no humanly intelligible
pattern to be discovered in the stars or politically intelligible pattern in
voting behaviour. So that no science of astrology or psephology is possible,
no matter now scrupulously `scientific method' is adhered to.
30 K. R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 192.
31 Cf. J. J. C. Smart, op. cit., pp. 149-51.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 45
constituted by atomistic facts, were determined by the
needs of a particular concept of knowledge. This led to
a barrage of problems and an impossible account of
science. For from now on any structure, if it was
allowed at all, had to be located in the human mind or
the scientific community. Thus the world was literally
turned inside out in an attempt to confine it within
sentience. An inevitable `involution' in the philosophy
of science occurred. Without a concept of a reality
unknown, but at least in part knowable, philosophy could
not display the creative and critical activity of
science, and ceased to be of any practical relevance for
it. This was the price paid for the dissolution of
ontology. A philosophy for science depends upon its
reconstitution.
.