From owner-bhaskar Wed Oct 16 11:41:50 1996
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 09:36:50 -0600
Message-Id: <199610161536.JAA19185@marx.econ.utah.edu.econ.utah.edu>
From: Hans Ehrbar
Subject: rts2-16
56 A Realist Theory of Science
6. A SKETCH OF A CRITIQUE OF EMPIRICAL REALISM
I have argued that the causal structures and generative
mechanisms of nature must exist and act independently of
the conditions that allow men access to them, so that
they must be assumed to be structured and intransitive,
i.e. relatively independent of the patterns of events and
the actions of men alike. Similarly I have argued that
events must occur independently of the experiences in
which they are apprehended. Structures and mechanisms
then are real and distinct from the patterns of events
that they generate; just as events are real and distinct
>from the experiences in which they are apprehended.
Mechanisms, events and experiences thus constitute three
overlapping domains of reality, viz. the domains of the
real, the actual and the empirical. This is represented
in Table 1.1 below. The crux of my objection to the
doctrine of empirical realism should now be clear. By
constituting an ontology based on the category of
experience,
Table 1.1
---------------------------------------------------------
Domain of Domain of Domain of
Real Actual Empirical
Mechanisms X
Events X X
Experiences X X X
---------------------------------------------------------
Note. for transcendental realism d_r>=d_a>=d_e . . . (i)
where d_r, d_a, and d_e are the domains of the
real, the actual and the empirical respectively.
For empirical realism d_r=d_a=d_e . . . (ii).
Comment: (ii) is a special case of (i), which
depends in general upon antecedent social activity, and
in which
(a) for d_a=d_e the events are known under epistemically
significant descriptions, which depends upon skilled
perception (and thus a skilled perceiver);
(b) for d_r=d_a an antecedent closure has been obtained,
which depends upon skilled experimentation (and thus the
planned disruption of nature).
---------------------------------------------------------
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 57
as expressed in the concept of the empirical world and
mediated by the ideas of the actuality of the causal laws
and the ubiquity of constant conjunctions, three domains
of reality are collapsed into one. This prevents the
question of the conditions under which experience is in
fact significant in science from being posed; and the
ways in which these three levels are brought into harmony
or phase with one another from being described.
Now these three levels of reality are not naturally
or normally in phase. It is the social activity of
science which makes them so. Experiences, and the facts
they ground, are social products; and the conjunctions of
events, that, when apprehended in experience, provide the
empirical grounds for causal laws, are, as we have seen,
social products too. It can thus be seen that underlying
and necessary for the implicit ontology of empirical
realism is an implicit sociology in which facts and their
conjunctions are seen as given by nature or spontaneously
(voluntaristically) produced by men. In this chapter I
have outlined an answer to the question `what must the
world be like for science to be possible?'. In Chapter 3
I will ask `what must society be like for science to be
possible ?'; i.e. I shall attempt a transcendental
deduction of certain basic sociological categories from
an investigation of the conditions for the possibility of
science. The answer to these two questions will
constitute the interwoven themes of this work. It is
impossible to over-emphasize how closely they are
connected. For once, for example, we reject the doctrine
that there are everywhere in nature such things as
spontaneously occurring parallel cases and see rather
that in general they have to be assiduously worked for
and artificially produced in the social activity of
science, we are forced to constitute an ontology of
structures distinct from events.
For us, for the moment, it is sufficient merely to
note that the most important feature of science neglected
by the doctrine of empirical realism is that it is work;
and hard work at that. Work consists, paradigmatically,
in the transformation of given products. Scientific
change is an integral feature of science, in which what
is transformed is a part of the formally accredited stock
of scientific knowledge. In a scientific training the
object transformed is not knowledge but man himself. But
in both cases what is transformed is itself already a
social product. The
58 A Realist Theory of Science
peculiar significance of experimental activity is that
man qua material object (rather than simply thinker or
perceiver) exercises his causal powers to transform the
natural world itself, of which he is also a part. Now
corresponding to the dissolution of ontology in
philosophy, there has been a parallel denegation of the
social character of science. In Chapter 3 I will set out
to vindicate sociology in an attempt to render
intelligible scientific change. This will enable me to
reconstitute a transitive dimension, as complementary to
the intransitive one established here.
The concept of the empirical world is
anthropocentric. The world is what men can experience.
But the couple of this concept, and from a realist
meta-perspective necessary to sustain it, is the absence
of the concept of the antecedent social activity
necessary to make experience significant in science. And
this has the objectionable ideological consequence (from
the point of view of the practice of science) that
whatever men currently experience is unquestionably the
world. Now it is central to the argument of this study
that the concepts `empirical' and `sense-experience'
belong quite unequivocally to the social world of
science. Experiences are a part, and when set in the
context of the social activity of science an
epistemically critical part, of the world. But just
because they are a part of the world they cannot be used
to define it. An experience to be significant in science
must normally be the result of a social process of
production; in this sense it is the end, not the
beginning of a journey. But only transcendental realism
can explain why scientists are correct in regarding
experience as in the last instance the test of theory.
For it is by means of it that, under conditions which are
artificially produced and controlled, skilled men can
come to have access to those enduring and active
structures, normally hidden or present to men only in
distorted form, that generate the actual phenomena of our
world. Empirical realism depends upon a reduction of the
real to the actual and of the actual to the empirical.
It thus presupposes the spontaneity of conjunctions and
of facts. And in doing so presupposes a closed world and
a completed science.
It is important to stress that I am not saying that
experiences are less real than events, or events less
real than structures. This is the kind of mistake that
is encouraged by the way in which
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 59
Eddington formulated his problem of the relationship
between the familiar and the scientific worlds; in which
he described the situation as one in which there were
`duplicates' of every object: two tables, two chairs, two
pens, etc.43 Since then the problem has always seemed to
be that of saying which object is real. For the ordinary
language instrumentalist the scientific object is an
artificial construct;44 for the scientistic
super-realist the familiar object a mere illusion.45 For
the transcendental realist however this formulation of
the problem is bogus. For if there is a relationship
between the worlds it is one of natural generation, not
an interpretation of man. The relationship is not
between a real and an imaginary object, but between two
kinds of real object, one of which is very small. The
relationship between electrons and tables has to be
understood in terms of causal connections, not
correspondence rules. Consequents are not less real, or
the statements describing them less true, in virtue of
their being effects; any more than causes, in virtue of
being recondite, must be imaginary. In particular, the
fact that the properties of everyday objects, at what has
been picturesquely described as the zone of the middle
dimensions,46 can be explained in terms of the very small
(or the very large) does not render them less real than
the entities that account for them; anymore than zinc and
sulphuric acid cease to react in a certain way when we
explain their reaction in terms of their atomic
structure.
For the transcendental realist laws, though not our
knowledge of them, are categorically independent of men -
as thinkers, causal agents and perceivers.
Transcendental realism can thus accommodate both Locke's
view that there are (or may be) laws which are
unknowable;47 and Kneale's suggestion that
43 A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World,
p. xi. Stebbing substituted the idea of `counterparts'
for that of `duplicates' in her rendering of the
problem. See L. S. Stebbing, Philosophy and The
Physicists, p. 60.
44 See e.g. L. S. Stebbing, op. cit., p. 66; and
G. Ryle, Dilemmas, p. 80.
45 See e.g. W. Sellars, `The Language of Theories',
Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science,
ed. H. Feigl and G. Maxwell, p. 76; and P. K.
Feyerabend, `Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism',
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science,
Vol. III, ed. H. Feigl and a. Maxwell, p. 83.
46 M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary
Physics, p. 294.
47 J. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
esp. Bk. IV, Chap. III.
60 A Realist Theory of Science
there are (or may be) laws whose instances are
unperceivable.48 But it allows in addition the
possibility of known laws, whose instances are
perceivable, but which, when not instanced in closed
systems, remain unmanifest to men. However, my
interpretation of these possibilities is different from
Locke's (and Kneale's). For the transcendental realist,
our knowledge, perceptual skills and causal powers are
set in the context of the ongoing social activity of
science; and in the course of it they are continually
being extended, to which process there can be no a priori
limits. Thus though it may be necessary, to the extent
that science is always incomplete, that at any moment of
time some laws are unknowable; it is not necessary that
any particular laws are.
Locke's mistake in failing to appreciate the
possibility that the `sad experience' of chemists who
`sometimes in vain, search for the same qualities in one
parcel of sulphur, antimony or vitriol, which they have
found in others'49 might come to be transformed in the
course of the development of science into a knowledge of
the `constitution of their insensible parts, from which
flow those sensible qualities, which serve us to
distinguish one from another'50 was not a scientific
mistake. It did not consist in his failure to foresee
the development of the theory of atomic number and
valency or to predict Mendeleyeev's predictions. His
scepticism over the possibility of a scientific knowledge
of real essences was a philosophical mistake, rooted in
his theory of ideas. For if all our knowledge is
acquired in perception and perception constitutes the
world, there can be no place for an antecedent cause of
knowledge (or of perception). But as only what is seen
as socially produced can be seen as putatively socially
transformable, this leads inevitably to an a-historical
view of science.
Locke's error was not therefore based on an
inadequate
48 W. Kneale, Probability and Induction, pp. 97-103.
Kneale's point could be strengthened by an argument to
show that in the case of physical theories the basic
entities must be unperceivable. For if they were
perceivable it would seem possible to ask what caused
them to manifest themselves to us as perceivable; in
which case they could not be basic. This is a general
argument in favour of a field-theoretic interpretation
of basic entities in physics. Cf. Dingle's comment that
if photons could be seen they would get in the way
(J. J. C. Smart, op. cit., p. 38).
49 J. Locke, op. cit., Bk. III, Chap. 6.9.
50 J. Locke, op.cit. Bk. IV, Chap. 3.7.
Philosophy and Scientific Realism 61
knowledge of chemistry. But on an inadequate concept of
the transitive dimension of science, which prevented him
>from seeing the current state of chemistry as what it
was, viz. the current state of a science; and which thus
allowed him to be influenced by it into propounding a
general philosophical thesis about knowledge - and in
particular of course about the impossibility of a certain
kind of knowledge, viz. of real essences. Locke's case
has a general moral. For without a concept of science as
a process-in-motion and of knowledge as possessing (in
the sense indicated in Section 1 above) a material cause,
it is easy to argue from the current state of a science
to a philosophical thesis about knowledge. Consider, for
example, the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum theory.
More important perhaps, the influence of Newtonian
mechanics on 18th century philosophy led to a kind of
stasis in thought from which the philosophy of science
has still to recover. Action-by-contact as a paradigm of
causality, the celestial closure as a model of knowledge,
gravity as the template of our ignorance all had a
disastrous effect. The underdevelopment of the sciences
of substance in comparison with the science of motion (of
the time), and the form that the latter took, thus had,
at a decisive moment in the history of philosophy,
through the generation of a static philosophical
conception of knowledge, a permanent effect on all
subsequent `philosophy of science'. It is in this sense
that in philosophy we are still prisoners of the
scientific thought of the past.
The anthropocentric and epistemic biases of
classical philosophy have resulted in the dominance, in
philosophy, of what might be styled `idols' of a Baconian
kind. These are false conceptions which cause men to
see, in philosophy, everything in relation to themselves
(cf. the concept of the empirical world) and their
present knowledge. Six hundred years ago, Copernicus
argued that the universe does not revolve around man.
And yet in philosophy we still represent things as if it
did. In the philosophy of science there must be two
Copernican Revolutions. The first establishing a
transitive dimension in which our knowledge is seen to be
socially produced, and as such neither an epiphenomenon
of nature nor a convention of man. The second
establishing an intransitive dimension, based on the
reconstitution of a philosophical ontology, in which the
world of which,
62 A Realist Theory of Science
in the social activity of science, knowledge is obtained
is seen to be in general quite independent of man.
These Copernican Revolutions must be given a Copernican
interpretation (for philosophy has its Osianders too);
which is why we need the metaphysics of transcendental
realism, which will be vindicated by its capacity to
render intelligible the underanalysed phenomenon of
science.
Corresponding to the two criteria advanced on page
24 above two acid tests for a philosophy of science may
be developed:
(1) is knowledge regarded as socially produced,
i.e. as having a material cause of its own kind? or is
it read straight onto the natural world or out of the
human mind?
(2) are the objects of knowledge regarded as
existing and acting independently of men? or do they
depend implicitly or explicitly upon men for their
existence and/or activity?
Scientists try to discover the reasons for things
and events, patterns and processes, sequences and
structures. To understand how they do so one needs both
a concept of the transitive process of
knowledge-production and a concept of the intransitive
objects of the knowledge they produce: the real
mechanisms that generate the actual phenomena of the
world, including as a special case our perceptions of
them.
.