I recently attended a workshop called “The
Pragmatic Alternative.” The big question of the conference was “What is
pragmatism in the philosophy of science?” Here I offer my own answer to that
question. As I see it, pragmatism’s main foil is representationalism. I define
representationalism as the philosophical doctrine that scientific representations’
capacity for mirroring stuff in the world accounts for the success of
scientific practices. Here, representations are theories, models, etc.;
mirroring includes relations of correspondence, similarity, and various kinds
of iso- and homomorphisms; and stuff in the world includes objects, properties,
and structures. I take the phrase “accounting for” to include, but not be
limited to, philosophical analysis, explication, and explanation. At root, representationalism
is a commitment about the direction of such accounts: mirroring accounts for scientific
success.
The traditional reason to reject representationalism concern
so-called “placement problems.” Very roughly if part of our successful scientific
practice entails that X exists, then representationalists
must explain the success of the practice in terms of its ability to mirror X’s in the world. However, some of our
scientific practices entail modal stuff: laws, causes, necessities,
possibilities, chances, etc. How to place modal stuff into a naturalistic worldview
is widely thought to be problematic. For some, this is reason to abandon
representationalism.
Enter my brand of pragmatism, which turns representationalism’s
account on its head: successful scientific practices account for scientific
representations’ mirroring the stuff in the world. So what does this look like?
Here’s a schema for one version of this:
1.
Science provides solid reasons for p.
2.
So, p.
3.
p
if and only if p is true.
4.
So, p
is true.
Regarding the first premise: this is a proxy for actual,
first-order scientific reasons for a given claim. So, for instance, if p is bacteria
causes ulcers, then the first premise of this schema will be nothing more
than the gastrological, bacteriological, etc. evidence for this causal claim.
This also means that, in an overwhelming number of cases, the inference from
the first claim to the second will be inductive. The general thought here is
that science provides us with our best reasons for thinking that the world is the
way that it is. The next thing to note is that one can perform a number of trivial
inferences in between the second and third claims of this schema. For instance,
in our toy example, we can infer that, e.g. bacteria
exist, something causes something, and
ulcers exist. The schema’s second
claim, along with all of these trivial consequences, furnish us with a “naturalized
ontology.” As naturalists, we realize that our chances of getting our ontology
right once and for all no better than those of the scientists from which that
ontology is derived. This is just to say that our ontology “falls out” of
scientific practice.
Finally, consider the last two steps in this schema. In Step
3, we adopt a deflationary account of
representational success, i.e. one in which the mirroring relationship does no
heavy-lifting. Note that nothing hinges on choosing truth as the kind of representational success. It’s only that we
have a very clear account of what a deflationary theory of truth would look
like in this case. A full-blooded pragmatism would also provide deflationary
accounts of representation, reference, and the like, any of which can be used in
the third step. The move from the third to the fourth step is what allows us to
say all the things that the representationalist wants to say, without according
those claims the same elevated status that the representationalist seeks to
give. It thereby accounts for representational success (fourth claim) in terms
of scientific practice (first claim).
This is a sketch, and raises several questions, which I hope
to address in another post:
A.
Can we make sense of successful scientific
practice without already smuggling in some assumptions about mirroring? In
other words, how do we vindicate the first claim in this schema without “cheating”?
B.
How does this brand of pragmatism compare with
others?
