Notes on Science and the Sciences

Some years ago I did a fair amount of self-directed reading in the philosophy of science and methodology in the natural and social sciences. What follows are some of the highlights and conclusions from my notes arranged so as to exhibit a measure of coherence although remaining well short of essay form. All the same, I hope you find them interesting, if not provocative (those of you who’ve known me since the days teaching at the community college or blogging at Ratio Juris will perhaps be familiar with at least some of this material).

I want to sketch in a very preliminary manner and with broad brush strokes, several reasons for finding persuasive what I’ll term a “non-reductionist and modest or (‘soft’) scientific realism,” a philosophy of science (or ‘meta-science’) that is explicit about the “limits” of science with regard, for instance, to explaining the nature of consciousness, the composition or nature and number of metaphysical pictures, the quixotic quest for a “Theory of Everything” (hereafter, TOE), and even as to what constitutes a scientific “fact.” This modest scientific realism is perfectly compatible with the complementary search for knowledge and truth in the motley religious and non-religious worldviews around our planet: in short, we may discover that metaphysical pluralism and epistemic relativism or perspectivalism is perfectly consistent with generalizable and pragmatic or “soft” realism about truth.

I’d like to open with a general observation regarding the role of naturalism or materialism in natural science (and in some measure, the social sciences as well), which is indicative of a methodological approach (including but not invariably reductionism), with minimal and unavoidable hypothetical metaphysical presuppositions and assumptions that may be pluralistic (given different accounts of the nature of either naturalism or materialism; e.g., the peculiar ‘materialism’ Galen Strawson), provisional and/or agnostic (in that sense, open-ended), with little or no infringement upon what Stephen Jay Gould termed the “magesterium” of religion. There may be more conflict and even similarities of a kind (cf. the work of Ian G. Barbour) between the respective “magesteria” of religion and science than Gould allowed (and neither Gould nor Barbour appear sufficiently conversant in ‘Eastern’ or Asian religious philosophies or worldviews), but I think he was in the main correct. So, on this model and for example, science does not ask questions about the “meaning of life” or rule out the possibility that there may be a domain of Reality beyond its purview (in other words, that can be sufficiently explained or accounted for in the language of science), that is, in some sense beyond the natural world. As John Cottingham has argued, even the philosophical projects of such disparate thinkers as Hume, Kant and (the early) Wittgenstein “do not, and indeed could not with any plausibility propose to eliminate the very possibility of a domain of reality lying beyond the phenomenal world.”

Let’s begin with the last topic from our introduction. John Ziman helps us understand the nature of “scientific facts,” a subject that by definition raises the question of scientific representation:

“It is a philosophical fantasy to suppose that a scientific [or empirical] ‘fact’ can be freed from the context in which it was observed. That context always contains both ‘theoretical’ and ‘subjective’ features, usually closely intertwined. A sophisticated instrument embodies many theoretical concepts. But these are only elaborations and extensions of the theories needed by a trained observer to ‘see’ what is scientifically significant in her personal experience of the world. And thus it is the case that even the most empirical research findings are saturated with theoretical notions and targeted on specific theoretical issues.”

The scientific facts produced in the natural sciences are not epistemically privileged vis-à-vis the knowledge provided by social scientists or even those working in the humanities. Ziman writes that these fields of intellectual inquiry

“[no] doubt...differ enormously in their subject matter, their intellectual objectives, their practical capabilities, and their social and psychic functions. Nevertheless, they belong to the same culture, and operate institutionally under the same ethos. As a consequence, the knowledge produced by the natural sciences is no more ‘objective,’ and no less ‘hermeneutic,’ than the knowledge produced by the social, behavioral and other human sciences. In the last analysis, they are all of equal epistemological weight.”

As to the theoretical aspect of scientific facts: “Theories are schematic. They introduce order into representations of experience at the price of obliterating specific facts.” And theories often rely on taxonomy, indeed, taxonomy itself is suffused with theory:

”In meta-scientific terms, classification, like observation, is a ‘theory-laden’ activity. It cannot be done entirely without reference to its intellectual and social environment. The resulting scheme always reflects conscious or unconscious influences, such as socially potent metaphors, formal mathematical patterns, the supposed functions of component elements, relationships to unobservable structures, or the need to reconcile conflicting conceptual or practical paradigms.”

With Philip Kitcher in Science, Truth and Democracy (2001) and Ronald N. Giere in Science without Laws (1999), Zyman suggests we view the nature of scientific representation in theories on the order of maps. In Giere’s words,

“Maps have many of the representational features we need for understanding how scientists represent the world. There is no such thing as a universal map [one reason why Kitcher says we cannot have a ‘Theory of Everything,’ for an ‘ideal atlas is a myth’]. Neither does it make sense to question whether a map is true or false. The representational virtues of maps are different. A map may, for example, be more or less accurate, more or less detailed, of smaller or larger scale. Maps require a large background of human convention for their production and use. Without such they are no more than lines on paper. Nevertheless, maps do manage to correspond in various ways with the real world. Their representational powers can be attested by anyone who has used a map when traveling in unfamiliar territory.”

The cartographic analogy is central to Giere’s notion of a “perspectival realism” that attempts to steer a middle course between (traditional and strongly metaphysical) scientific realism and purely constructivist accounts of science, that is to say, it endeavors to appreciate their relative merits on both epistemological and metaphysical grounds. Kitcher’s discussion of “mapping reality” is likewise on behalf of a “modest realism” that wishes to retain the notion (in some measure) of a “mind-independent” reality or robust conception of objectivity while acknowledging such things as the underdetermination of theory by evidence. In Kitcher’s words, “There is all the difference between organizing thought and speech, and making reality: ...we should not confuse the possibility of constructing representations with that of constructing the world.” Or, as Helen Longino puts it, “one can be a realist in the sense of holding that there is a world independently of our thinking that there is one, without being a scientific realist in the sense of holding that the successes of our best theories consists in the world having exactly the features attributed to it by those theories.” Ziman summarizes the scientific significance of the cartographic analogy:

“As philosophers and other meta-scientists are coming to realize, theories are very like maps. Almost every general statement one can make about scientific theories is equally applicable to maps. They are representations of a supposed ‘reality.’ They are social institutions. They abstract, classify, and simplify numerous ‘facts.’ They are functional. They require skilled interpretation. And so on. The analogy is evidently much more than a vivid metaphor. In effect, every map is a theory. An analysis of the most commonplace map explores almost all the meta-scientific features of the most recondite theory. From a naturalistic point of view, the London Underground map exemplifies these features just as well as, say, the ‘Standard Model’ of particular physics.”

Indeed, and much to the chagrin of the old-fashioned scientific realist, “It is clear that scientific maps, models, metaphors, themata and other analogies are not just tools of thought, or figures of speech. They are of the very substance of scientific theory. As sources of meaning and understanding, they stand on an equal footing with explicit verbal and symbolic representations.”

To be sure, “perspectival” realism and “modest” realism are still species of realism, yet there is no longer the hard and fast metaphysical commitment to the idea of science as describing things “out there”—objects or not—as they really are or giving us the definitive account of how the world, simply and absolutely, in fact is. Thus Sophie Allen rightly concludes that opponents of conventional scientific realism

“do not always—or even usually—count themselves as being sceptics about the existence of the external world, as idealists, phenomenalists or verificationists. Rather, their scepticism is rather more restricted in scope and concerns the existence, or the nature, of the types of entities which the theory postulates or, even more narrowly, what might be called the ‘unobservables’ postulated by scientific theory. Such entities either do not exist, they claim, or they do not exist entirely mind-independently; that is, they do not exist independently of humans theorizing about them.”

We should be suspicious of references to “empirical rigor” that speak of the necessity for mastering “statistical outputs” from the “hard sciences,” indeed, we should abandon once and for all the notion of “hard” and “soft” sciences (the social sciences falling into the latter category).

First, we need to forthrightly acknowledge the sundry implications that follow from the fact that, as Ziman says, “The techniques used in scientific research are extraordinarily diverse, from counting sheep and watching birds to detecting quasars and creating quarks. The epistemic methodologies of research are equally varied, from mental introspection to electronic computation, from quantitative measurement to speculative inference.”

Empirical number-crunching is no more intrinsically “rigorous” or “hard” than these other methodologies, all with their respective appropriate domains and requisite purposes. In Ziman’s words, “not all scientifically observable features of the world can be measured, and not all the results of scientific measurement properly be treated as variables in mathematical formulae.” In particular and in “practice, most of the entities that figure theoretically in the human sciences are not ‘arithmemorphic,’ and are not at all amenable to formal mathematical analysis.” The belief or wish that things are or will be otherwise, however, is an obdurate one.

Economics has long sought to distinguish itself as a “hard” science that, at bottom, relies on mathematical formalism for its axiomatic propositions. Whatever my disagreement with her views on the virtues of neo-classical economics, Deirdre McCloskey has courageously, cleverly, and persistently endeavored to persuade her colleagues in economics to rely far less on mathematical formalism and a “scientistic style,” and much more on the “whole rhetorical tetrad—the facts, logics, metaphors, and stories necessary” [….] that enable her discipline to become at once “more rational and more reasonable….” No doubt, as McCloskey, makes plain, “It would of course be idiotic to object to the mere existence of mathematics in economics,” in effect sharing Hilary Putnam’s motivation for speaking favorably of the Pragmatist “revolt against formalism:” “This revolt against formalism is not a denial of the utility of formal models in certain contexts; but it manifests itself in a sustained critique of the idea that formal models, in particular, systems of symbolic logic, rule books of inductive logic, formalizations of scientific theories, etc.—describe a condition to which rational thought can or should aspire.” In our case, the reference would be to the rationality peculiar to scientific methods and theorizing. To paraphrase and quote again from Putnam, our conceptions of even scientific rationality cast a net far wider than all that can be logicized or mathematized, in short, formalized: “The horror of what cannot be methodized is nothing but method fetishism” Or, in the words of Ziman, “the domain of science extends far beyond the scope of formal reasoning,” and thus formal reasoning is not emblematic of the “highest” or “best” sort of scientific theorizing, as the types and standards of scientific reasoning vary from discipline to discipline, as well as across the divide between the natural and social sciences.

By way of illustration, consider Kevin Drum’s comment on a snippet from a recent piece by editors of Nature, which serves to undermine the assumptions essential to the putative division between the “hard” and “soft” sciences:

“Because they deal with systems that are highly complex, adaptive and not rigorously rule-bound, the social sciences are among the most difficult of disciplines, both methodologically and intellectually.... So, what has political science ever done for us? We don’t, after all, know why crime rates rise and fall. We cannot solve the financial crisis or stop civil wars, and we cannot agree on the state’s role in systems of justice or taxation. As Washington Post columnist Charles Lane wrote in a recent article that called for the NSF not to fund any social science: “The ‘larger’ the social or political issue, the more difficult it is to illuminate definitively through the methods of ‘hard science.’”

In part, this just restates the fact that political science is difficult. To conclude that hard problems are better solved by not studying them is ludicrous. Should we slash the physics budget if the problems of dark-matter and dark-energy are not solved? Lane’s statement falls for the very myth it wants to attack: that political science is ruled, like physics, by precise, unique, universal rules.

The public commonly thinks of disciplines like physics and chemistry as hard because they rely so heavily on difficult mathematics. In fact, that’s exactly what makes them easy. It’s what Eugene Wigner famously called the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of math in the natural sciences: the fact that, for reasons we don’t understand, the natural world really does seem to operate according to strict mathematical laws. Those laws may be hard to figure out, but they aren’t impossible. And once you do figure them out, the rest is mere engineering.

Hari Seldon notwithstanding, the social sciences have no such luck. Human communities don’t obey simple mathematical laws, though they sometimes come tantalizingly close in certain narrow ways — close enough, anyway, to provide the intermittent reinforcement necessary to keep social scientists thinking that the real answer is just around the next corner. And once in a while it is. But most of the time it’s not. It’s decades of hard work away. Because, unlike physics, the social sciences are hard.”

We might, then, forswear forever the use of terms that assume or posit a divide between the so-called “hard” and “soft” sciences, with its barely concealed untenable judgment of the superior value and putative rigor of the former over the latter. This is simply nonsense and a curious relic from the history of hard-headed positivism. The methods, forms, and goals of causal explanation are at once more difficult and more modest in the case of the social sciences, owing to the centrality of “methodological individualism” (in Jon Elster’s sense) and the reliance upon “explanation by mechanisms” (again, in Elster’s sense). The fact that the natural sciences are often characterized as “hard,” while implying the social sciences need aspire to emulate their analytical “rigor” or “robustness,” is often due to a false understanding of both the nature and role of quantification and measurement in the natural sciences, best exemplified in physics (as Ziman notes, this in fact accords a ‘paradoxical’ quality to much of twentieth-century physics, for instance, in the denial of the possibility of perfectly precise simultaneous measurements of position and momentum). Even the exalted objective status of measurement involves a basis or standard for comparison, something that involves communal or intersubjective agreement on what entities and procedures are to be regarded as “standard.” Quantitative measurements have led to impressive results in many of the natural sciences and no one questions the significance of empirical and quantitative data. What is questionable, however, is the wholesale importation of this particular form of standardization as an ideal methodological desideratum for the social sciences. Moreover, one should not lose sight of the important fact that “there are many scientifically interesting aspects of the natural world that are not amenable to this treatment” (Ziman). There are numerous and telling reasons, in other words, that efforts to extend the methodology of statistics into the human sciences have produced comparatively meager results. Ziman reminds us of the often arbitrary and subjective categories that lie at the basis of social statistics and even basic demographic data.

In any case, all scientific facts, be they from the natural or social sciences (in the latter, as events or states of affairs) are “contextual,” and thus entail the intertwining of both “theoretical” and “subjective” features. One way of putting this is to refer, with Hilary Putnam, to the “entanglement of fact and value” as found in four principles from E.A. Singer, Jr.:

Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of theories.
Knowledge of theories presupposes knowledge of facts.
Knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values.
Knowledge of values presupposes knowledge of facts.

It goes for both the natural and social sciences that there “are no absolute rules on what constitutes a scientific fact” (Ziman). Philosophers, philosophers of sciences and meta-scientists have come to recognize scientific theories in both the natural and social sciences as analogous to (and thus having all the ‘rigor’ of) maps:

“Almost every general statement one can make about scientific theories is equally applicable to maps. They are representations of a supposed ‘reality.’ They are social instruments. They abstract, classify and simplify numerous ‘facts.’ They are functional. They require skilled interpretation. And so on. The analogy is evidently much more than a vivid metaphor” (Ziman).

In the human or social sciences we might call upon a notion of “empathetic rigor” rather than empirical rigor, given that empathy

“is an essential feature of observation in the human sciences. This is an old idea, going back to the eighteenth century. Ethnographers employ empathy constantly, as when they use interviews to enter people’s lives and elicit their personal value systems. In spite of insisting on their objectivity, historians have always had to infer the thoughts and motives of the human agents in their stories by re-enacting them in their own minds.”

And the fact that the human sciences often depend fundamentally on verstehen, that they are steeped in hermeneutics (which also relies on intersubjective norms), is not a fact to be bemoaned and overcome through displacement by empirical rigor. Indeed, I think Ziman is absolutely right to argue “the knowledge produced by the natural sciences is no more ‘objective,’ and no less ‘hermeneutic,’ than the knowledge produced by the social, behavioural and other human sciences. In the last analysis, they are all of equal epistemological weight.”

The “hard-soft” dichotomy is further unavailing when we consider the fact that “many important scientific disciplines, such as brain science and ecology, have emerged in the wide open spaces between hard-core physics and soft-centered sociology.” The so-called hard sciences hold no monopoly over or patent on, in short, no proprietary right to what counts as “good science,” the desiderata differ between the natural and social sciences.

Formalization, be it with statistics, logic, algorithmic compression, or Bayes’ theorem, for example, does not define the sine qua non of scientific theorizing for the social sciences. And in both the natural and social sciences, formalization is a matter of degree and much of science is not now nor will ever be conducive to formalization (for instance, we delude ourselves if we think the fullness of time will lead to a ‘Newton’ of sociology or anthropology, with the corresponding principles and laws for collective action, institutions, and so forth). For perfectly sensible and sound reasons, the language of scientific discourse is not circumscribed by what falls within symbolic logic. A mathematical argument is no more important or rigorous epistemically speaking than the theory in which it occurs. In the end, scientific rationality is but a species of or no more than (transcultural modes of) practical reasoning. Different kinds and standards of rationality are set in the various domains and disciplines of scientific research.

* * *

“It is popularly supposed that science can be distinguished from other modes of systematic inquiry by a distinctive method. This is not what is observed. The techniques used in scientific research are extraordinarily diverse, from counting sheep and watching birds to detecting quasars and creating quarks. The epistemic methodologies of research are equally varied, from mental introspection to electronic computation, from quantitative measurement to speculative inference.” — John Ziman

In the 1940s Robert Merton proposed the “prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions” that scientists come to feel bound to, the core of the scientific ethos if you will, were more or less captured by five fundamental norms or regulative principles: Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, Originality, and Scepticism (CUDOS). John Ziman argues that these norms no longer properly describe the ethos of what he terms “post-academic science” or what others call “Big Science.” In other words, (academic) science in roughly the last third of the twentieth century underwent “a radical, irreversible, worldwide transformation in the way that [it] is organized, managed and performed.” Of course this transformation was not absolute, thus we can speak of both continuities and differences between that sort of science which was formally and informally guided by CUDOS norms and post-academic science. Ziman contends this more straightforwardly industrial (and now highly technological and market-oriented) post-academic science is best understood by way of its alternative set of regulative principles or social norms (as Ziman explains, social and epistemic norms are closely bound up with each other):

“Very schematically, industrial science is Proprietary, Local, Authoritarian, Commissioned, and Expert. It produces proprietary knowledge that is not necessarily made public. It is focused on local technical problems rather than on general understanding. Industrial researchers act under managed authority rather than as individuals. Their research is commissioned to achieve practical goals, rather than undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge. They are employed as expert problem-solvers, rather than for their personal creativity. It is no accident, moreover, that these attributes spell out ‘PLACE.’ That, rather than ‘CUDOS,’ is what you get for doing good industrial science.” Moreover,

“post-academic science is under pressure to give more obvious value for money. Many features of the new mode of knowledge production have arisen ‘in the context of application’—that is, in the course of research on technological, environmental, medical or societal problems. More generally, science is being pressed into the service of the nation as the driving force in the national R & D system, a wealth-creating techno-scientific motor for the whole economy.”

In other words, utility and market imperatives fuel the ethos and practice of contemporary science to a degree unprecedented in the history of science. As Richard C. Lewontin notes in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), science is “guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time.” Symptomatic of such control is Lewontin’s anecdotal observation that “No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.” Ziman explains how deeply this new ethos has been inscribed in the practice of scientific research:

“... [A]s researchers become more dependent on project grants, the ‘Matthew Effect’ is enhanced. Competition for real money takes precedence over competition for scientific credibility as the driving force of science. With so many researchers relying completely on research grants or contracts for their personal livelihood, winning these become an end in itself. Research groups are transformed into small business enterprises. The metaphorical forum of scientific opinion is turned into an actual market in research sciences.”

Ziman provides us with a bounty of reasons for thinking deeply about the vulnerability of scientists to “the demands of their paymasters,” be they of private provenance or the product of the State’s science policy.

Let’s shift our attention to topics more explicitly and clearly epistemological and ontological, more theoretical and philosophical, the kind of subject matter that falls typically under the heading of “meta-science” and “philosophy of science,” but is sometimes treated in science studies and history of science as well. Again, we begin with Ziman, here on the nature of “scientific facts:”

“[no] doubt ... differ enormously in their subject matter, their intellectual objectives, their practical capabilities, and their social and psychic functions. Nevertheless, they belong to the same culture, and operate institutionally under the same ethos. As a consequence, the knowledge produced by the natural sciences is no more ‘objective,’ and no less ‘hermeneutic,’ than the knowledge produced by the social, behavioral and other human sciences. In the last analysis, they are all of equal epistemological weight.

We conclude with a few thoughts on the increasing recognition of the sheer folly intrinsic to thinking that the ideal end or goal of the scientific enterprise as such is to provide us with a “Theory of Everything” (TOE). The celebrated Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking was once one of the many advocates for a naturalistic TOE. However, as John Cottingham informs us,

“… reflection on Kurt Gödel’s famous incompleteness proof of 1931 has led Hawking to recant. In a more sober assessment he acknowledges that we can never be ‘angels who view the universe from the outside,’ but instead that both we and our models are ‘part of the universe we are describing.’ One might therefore expect any scientific theory we produce to be ‘either inconsistent, or incomplete.’ So in place of his earlier jocular ambition to know ‘the mind of God’ (i.e. to provide a complete naturalistic theory of the cosmos), Hawking now writes that he is glad he has changed his mind: ‘I’m now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end.’”

In Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (2000), Nicholas Rescher has come to the same conclusion but for different and long-standing reasons:

“The fatal flaw of any purported explanatory theory of everything arises in connection with the ancient paradox of reflectivity and self-substantiation. How can any theory adequately substantiate itself? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What are we to make of the individual—or the doctrine—that claims, ‘I stand ready to vouch for myself?’ And how can such self-substantiation be made effective? All the old difficulties of reflexivity and self-reference come to the fore here. No painter can paint a comprehensive picture of a setting that includes this picture itself. And no more, it would seem, can a theorist expound an explanatory account of nature that claims to account satisfactorily for that account itself. For in so far as that account draws on itself, this very circumstance undermines its validity.”

In place of a TOE, we might, with Hilary Putnam, consider an analogical lesson from the Copenhagen School in physics, specifically, Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, which enables us to appreciate the concept and possibility of complementarity, for “even ‘the empirical world,’ the world of our experience, cannot be adequately or completely described with just one picture, according to Bohr. Instead, we have to make a ‘complementary’ use of different classical pictures—wave pictures in some experimental situations, particle pictures in others—and give up the idea of a single picturable account to cover all situations.”

An appreciation of complementarity may require setting aside or rejecting the more robust versions (what Kitcher calls the ‘grander doctrines’) of metaphysical realism in science (as distinguished, say, from a more modest and minimal realism like Kitcher’s), or we might even go so far as to argue for metaphysical pluralism, as Michael Lynch has done in Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity (1998) and Truth as One and Many (2009). For Lynch, such metaphysical pluralism is in fact compatible with realism of a kind, for he argues that we need not be anti-realists in claiming that propositions and facts concerning the nature of reality are relative to conceptual schemes of worldviews. Consider the following snippets from the arguments that have led Lynch to this conclusion:

“The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.”

“[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid-like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are … flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a non-pejorative sense; they have what Waismann called ‘open texture.’”

“Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, ‘radically non-epistemic;’ that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.”

“[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.”

“Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.”

“Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.”

“All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.”

“Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.”

A comparable lesson concerning the value of metaphysical and epistemological modesty with regard to knowledge in philosophy, the sciences, the arts, as well as that arising from self-examination and ruminating on personal experience, including the virtues of pluralism and epistemic relativity might be drawn from Kurt Gödel’s demonstration that one cannot definitively prove the formal consistency of an axiomatic system from within the principles of that system. At any rate, foundationalist epistemic projects and exclusively Euclidean approaches to cognitive systematization are no longer plausible in epistemology. We now realize the significance of categorical and conceptual mediation in our descriptions of the world, a realization that commits us to neither a thorough-going or absolute relativism nor a purely subjectivist conception of truth. In the words of my dear friend and former teacher:

“To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate ‘true’ metaphysical descriptions of the world [the world of science providing us with one such picture] does not … necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this ‘real’ or ‘true’ world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. We need not accept a very different solution, such as that offered by Kant—that there is a world in which there exists the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but that we can never directly know this world. [….] The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.” (Nandini Iyer, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So,’ in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed., Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson, 2005: 123)

A perhaps more circumspect or modest expression of Iyer’s principal point is provided by Nicholas Rescher: “For all practical purposes—and for all implementable theoretical purposes as well—a plurality of beliefs about the truth (a plurality of visions) is a plurality of formulations of the true (a plurality of versions). And this fact is something we must somehow come to terms with.” The various ways we might speak of pluralism that are distinguished by Rescher: conceptual, logical, ontological, axiological, and practical, for instance, are jointly germane to both the study of science and appreciation of the truths that in principle exist within and thus might still be discovered in the plethora of worldviews, religious and otherwise, found around our planet.

References & Further Reading

Castañeda, Hector-Neri, “Philosophy as Science and as a Worldview,” in Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, eds. The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989.
Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life. London: Routledge, 2003.
Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
Elster, Jon. Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. New York: New Left Books, 1975/Verso, revised ed., 1988.
Feyerabend, Paul. Farewell to Reason. London: Verso, 1987.
Galison, Peter and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Ganeri, Jonardon, ed. The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Mind, Language and World. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Ganeri, Jonardon, ed. The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Ethics and Epics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Giere, Ronald. Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Giere, Ronald. Science without Laws. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Giere, Ronald. Scientific Perpectivism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Goodman, Lenn E. In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books/Prometheus Books, 2001.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999.
Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Iyer, Nandini. “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed. Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson. Leiden: Brill, 2005: 99-127.
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08/18/2020

Notes on Science and the Sciences

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