Abstract
My aim in this paper is to propose a way to study the role of perspectives in both the production and justification of experimental knowledge claims. My starting point for this will be Anjan Chakravartty’s claim that Ronald Giere’s perspectival account of the role of instruments in the production of such claims entails relativism in the form of irreducibly incompatible truths. This led Michela Massimi to argue that perspectivism, insofar as it wants to form a realist position, is only concerned with the justification of such claims: whether they are produced reliably is, on her view, a perspective-independent fact of the matter. Following a suggestion by Giere on how scientists handle incompatible experimental results, I will then argue that Massimi’s perspectivism can be extended to also cover the production of such claims, without falling into relativism. I will elaborate this suggestion by means of Uljana Feest’s work on how scientists handle incompatible experimental results. I will argue that, if we reconceptualize perspectives as embodied and situated ways of going about in experimentation that can be made explicit through interpretation, we can obtain a fruitful understanding of the role of perspectives in both the production and justification of experimental knowledge. While this role is primarily exploratory, it can still allow for a substantial form of realism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Evidence for this claim can be found, for example, in the fact that in a recent edited volume on perspectivism (Massimi and McCoy 2019), there are no chapters explicitly concerned with experimentation, whereas many of them discuss models and representation.
A paradigmatic case of this claim for many perspectivists is offered by fluid dynamics, since it offers different, incompatible ways to model the behaviour of fluids. Which model one is supposed to use depends on the type of issue one is dealing with: if the goal is to explain, for example, how water flows or how waves propagate in a fluid, one will opt for the continuous, incompressible fluid model provided by the perspective of hydrodynamics; if, on the other hand, one wants to explain for example diffusion phenomena, the discrete particles model provided by the perspective of statistical mechanics will be preferable. This choice makes a difference, for as Massimi (2018a, [p. 350]) points out, from the perspective of hydrodynamics, viscosity, for example, is a fundamental property of water, whereas it does not figure directly in the perspective of statistical mechanics. For different discussions of fluid dynamics as a case for perspectivism, see e.g. (Rueger 2005, 2016, Giere 2009, Morrison 2011).
That Massimi also ascribes to this characterization of Giere’s perspectivism can be seen from her claim that she developed her perspectivism in response to the worries with Giere’s perspectivism that “there is no specific way the observed objects are in and of themselves, independently of the particular perspective from which they are observed or detected” (2012, p. 29) and that “as soon as the prefix “From where we stand … ” is added, and truth claims are made relative to a perspective, the ghost of relativism comes back to haunt the perspectivist” (2012, p. 30). See also Massimi’s 2015 discussion of how Giere’s perspectivism and his reading of Kuhn on which it is based can lead to relativism with respect to both natural kinds and truth.
As Feest (2016p. 37) points out, Collins elaborates his notion of experimental ability on the basis of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on rule-following. For overviews of the literature on ability, know how and tacitness, see (Rouse 1987, p. 100, footnote 59), (Soler 2011, p. 397 – 399) and (Turner 2014, chapters 4 – 5).
Feest gives the following list of examples of such strategies: “(1) appeals to a well-corroborated theory of the apparatus, (2) the use of different experimental apparatuses, (3) the demonstration that the same apparatus can detect similar phenomena, (4) the test of predictions about the results of an experimental intervention, and many others (the list is open-ended)” (2016, p. 35).
The similarity between Massimi’s position and Franklin’s shows itself in that Franklin’s epistemological strategies (see footnote 7) offer scientists ways to obtain the beliefs that, according to Massimi, make up their epistemic perspective (see page 9).
See (Soler 2011) for a very extensive discussion of the different ways in which scientists can engage with the work of others in order to arrive at a better understanding of the possible tacit aspects that go into the production and validation of this work.
This conceptualization of perspectives as constructed through a process of dialogue and interpretation comes quite close to an idea recently formulated by Massimi, which is that “[t]he willingness to engage with other epistemic agents occupying different scientific perspectives (synchronically and diachronically) is […] key to perspectivism as a pluralist view about ways of knowing” (2019a, p. 11). (At the time of writing, this article Massimi 2019a is online-only. Hence, page-references are not to the journal page numbers, but rather to the page numbers of the pdf-version found online.) The conceptualization as it is presented here is based on Feest’s account of tacit knowledge as “something that is only constructed in the process of “explication,” where such explications can be tailored to specific purposes” (2016, p. 42). Feest in turn acknowledges that her view derives from Stephen Turner’s 2014 work on tacit knowledge.
This is an idea I take from Joseph Rouse’s 1987 practical-hermeneutical account of experimentation.
My inspiration for this conceptualization of operationalizations as stabilized rather than as established derives from Feest’s 2011 work on the stabilization of experimental phenomena.
The view presented here is thus in line with Hacking’s (1982, 1991) conceptualization of experimentation as a particular style of reasoning, according to which the fact that we are in a position to ascribe truth values to experimental knowledge claims is the result of a contingent historical process in which the laboratory is developed as a space for experimental investigations and reasoning. See especially (Hacking 1992, p. 51, footnote 2) for how he sees the relationship between the laboratory and experimentation as a style of reasoning.
I would like to thank two anynonymous reviewers for pushing me on these points.
References
Bogen, J., & Woodward, J. (1988). Saving the phenomena. Philosophical Review, 97(3), 305–352.
Chakravartty, A. (2010). Perspectivism, inconsistent models, and contrastive explanations. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 405–412.
Feest, U. (2003). Exploratory experimentation, concept formation, and theory construction in psychology. In Feest, U., & Steinle, F. (Eds.) Scientific concepts and investigative practice. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Feest, U. (2011). What exactly is stabilized when phenomena are stabilized?. Synthese, 182, 57–71.
Feest, U. (2016). The experimenters’ regress reconsidered: replication, tacit knowledge, and the dynamics of knowledge generation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 58, 34–45.
Giere, R. (2006). Scientific perspectivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Giere, R. (2009). Scientific perspectivism: behind the stage door. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 40, 221–223.
Hacking, I. (1982). Language, truth and reason. In Hollis, M., & Lukes, S. (Eds.) Rationality and relativism. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and intervening: introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, I. (1991). ‘Style’ for historians and philosophers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 23(1), 1–20.
Hacking, I. (1992). The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences. In Pickering, A. (Ed.) Science as practice and culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Massimi, M. (2012). Scientific perspectivism and its foes. Philosophica, 84, 25–52.
Massimi, M. (2015). Walking the line: Kuhn between realism and relativism. In Devlin, W.J., & Bokulich, A. (Eds.) Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolutions – 50 years on. Heidelberg: Springer.
Massimi, M. (2018a). Four kinds of perspectival truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XCVI, 342–359.
Massimi, M. (2018b). Perspectival modeling. Philosophy of Science, 85, 335–359.
Massimi, M. (2019a). Realism, perspectivism, and disagreement in science. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02500-6.
Massimi, M. (2019b). Two kinds of exploratory models. Philosophy of Science, 86, 869–881.
Massimi, M., & McCoy, C.D. (2019). Understanding perspectivism scientific challenges and methodological prospects. New York: Routledge.
Morrison, M. (2011). One phenomenon, many models: Inconsistency and complementarity. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 42, 342–351.
Rouse, J. (1987). Knowledge and power towards a political philosophy of science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rueger, A. (2005). Perspectival models and theory unification. British Journal for Philosophy of Science, 56, 579–594.
Rueger, A. (2016). Perspectival realism and incompatible models. Axiomathes, 26, 401–410.
Schickore, J. (2016). “Exploratory experimentation” as a probe into the relation between historiography and philosophy of science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 55, 20–26.
Soler, L. (2011). Tacit aspects of experimental practices: analytical tools and epistemological consequences. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 1, 393–433.
Sosa, E. (1991). Knowledge in perspective selected essays in epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Steinle, F. (1997). Entering new fields: exploratory uses of experimentation. Philosophy of Science, 64, S65–S74.
Steinle, F. (2016). Exploratory experiments: Ampére, faraday and the origins of electrodynamics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Teller, P. (2001). The twilight of the perfect model model. Erkenntnis, 55, 393–415.
Turner, S. (2014). Understanding the tacit. New York: Routledge.
van Fraassen, B. (2008). Scientific representation: paradoxes of perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vogel, J. (2000). Reliabilism leveled. The Journal of Philosophy, 97(11), 602–623.
Vogel, J. (2008). Epistemic bootstrapping. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(9), 518–539.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Michela Massimi, Friedrich Steinle, Marco Giovanelli, Bert Leuridan, Karim Zahidi, Jo Bervoets, Ana-Maria Creţu and the audience of the Edinburgh Graduate Work in Progress seminar for discussions of the ideas contained in this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Perspectivism in science: metaphysical and epistemological reflections
Guest Editor: Michela Massimi
The author would like to acknowledge the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) as funding institution. Part of this paper was written during a stay as a visiting researcher at the University of Edinburgh with Michela Massimi’s ERC-project Perspectival Realism: Science, Knowledge and Truth from a Human Vantage Point.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Potters, J. Perspectivism and the epistemology of experimentation. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 10, 24 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00289-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00289-7