Abstract
This paper continues the defense of a version of scientific realism, Tautological Scientific Realism (TSR), that rests on the claim that, excluding some areas of fundamental physics about which doubts are entirely justified, many areas of contemporary science cannot be coherently imagined to be false other than via postulation of radically skeptical scenarios, which are not relevant to the realism debate in philosophy of science. In this paper we discuss, specifically, the threats of meaning change and reference failure associated with the Kuhnian tradition, which depend on a descriptivist approach to meaning, and we argue that descriptivism is not the right account of the meaning and reference of theoretical terms. We suggest that an account along the lines of the causal-historical theory of reference provides a more faithful picture of how terms for unobservable theoretical entities and properties come to refer; we argue that this picture works particularly well for TSR. In the last section we discuss how our account raises concerns specifically for perspectival forms of scientific realism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We find the word ‘lore’ to be a convenient term for the bits of knowledge that we want to talk about in explicating TSR. ‘Lore’ has the right connotations: long-established and accepted things, but ones which perhaps should not be assumed to be true. By contrast, words like ‘knowledge’ and ‘fact’ carry the implication of truth, which is question-begging in the context of discussing and defending SR.
For critical discussion of selective realism, see Tulodziecki (2017).
The Darwinian synthesis in biology, discovery of the mechanisms of heredity (DNA and RNA and other things), and some other major discoveries have occurred outside of physics, of course. But in these fields scientists were well aware beforehand that they did not have the truth or anything very close to it. So the discoveries did not have the character of radical overthrow of earlier beliefs that one sees in some physics revolutions.
At this point some philosophers may object that we are just expressing our own subjective confidence in current science, and note that people in (say) the late nineteenth century might well have felt a similar confidence despite having an enormous number of beliefs that we now regard as false. But we believe that, despite the occasional expressions of extreme confidence that can be found in some statements of some prominent scientists, in fact many scientists back then understood that their theories were incomplete and quite possibly false in important respects. An example of this would be Darwin’s acknowledgment that he did not know what the mechanisms of inheritance were. An exploration of how the confidence of scientists in the late twentieth century and beyond compares with the confidence of earlier generations is a project beyond the scope of this paper.
Hoefer (2020) explores briefly the justification of TSR’s claim in the context of a couple of different pieces of scientific lore outside of fundamental physics.
Note that the epistemic handles we have on a kind of entity such as viruses, are not simply bits of descriptive beliefs that we have about them (although our beliefs do of course play a role in how epistemic handles get established and how they relate to the things and facts that they are handles on). For example, electron microscopes—the things themselves and their behaviors, as well as our beliefs about them—constitute part of our epistemic handles on viruses. And the network of interactions involved in microscopy are also part of our epistemic handles on viruses, despite not all of them being about viruses in any direct sense. So epistemic handles include types of evidence about (or for) some thing or factual proposition; types of interaction with a thing; as well as ways of knowing and doing that are integrated into our web of beliefs and practices.
We include much of cosmology in the ambit of fundamental physics that must be quarantined for now, because its fundamental posits and models are strongly connected with fundamental physical theories such as General Relativity, the Standard Model of particle/field physics, and sometimes even speculative quantum gravity theories.
Note that this is not because either chemistry or biology can be said to be domains in which material things obey classical Newtonian physics. In both sciences facts about ions, chemical bonds and a number of purely quantum effects are frequently relevant. But those relevant facts can be captured in terms of the entities that we believe to be “here to stay” and their behaviors, which we claim to be included in the safe areas of physics lore.
Minor changes or adjustments in our web of beliefs, of course, happen all the time, and presumably not even Kuhn and Feyerabend would regard them as really changing the meanings of the connected words.
Under Kuhnian holism it is clearly not so. Multiple very important changes in beliefs about the electron, and about the nature of fundamental particles in general—as well as about mass, space, time, energy and more—occurred in physics between 1906 and, say, 1976, by which time the Standard Model was clearly established. Some descriptivists, anti-realist descriptivists, would of course be happy to side with Kuhn on this point.
Neutrinos may belong to the quarantine zone of fundamental physics rather than the safe/established part, and if so one is free to doubt their existence for the same reasons that one doubts other elements of fundamental theory. Our point is that we hope no one doubts the existence of neutrinos because they considered, before 1998, ‘Neutrinos have no mass’ to be true by definition. We thank Ana Maria Cretu for drawing our attention to the example of neutrinos. For discussion of potential implications of this case for essentialism, see Cretu (2018).
As we will argue below, we should not give in to the temptation of thinking that those epistemic handles form a kind of descriptivist cluster. As mentioned above, epistemic handles are not simply bits of descriptive knowledge; this will be clarified further in section 4.
A number of philosophers have argued that a causal component to the account of reference is needed to avoid problems of referential failure or problems of referential continuity; see, for example, Newton-Smith (1981) chapter 7.
Are (a) and (b) explicitly held in the mind of the introducer of the term t? Or are they in the minds of the relevant community (whether explicitly or implicitly)? We will assume the latter, since it seems to be the most plausible way of interpreting the proposal. We believe that nothing in our discussion will depend on this question.
Notice that causation appears in both of Psillos’ conditions, and this seems to be his reason for describing his view as a form of “causal descriptivism”. Psillos’ account is nonetheless quite different from some earlier accounts of reference that have gone by the same moniker, for example Lewis (1984) and Jackson (1978), but is somewhat closer to Kroon (1987). We will not discuss the earlier causal descriptivism; for criticism, see Raatikainen (2006) and Martí (2020).
See his discussion of the history of chlorine, pp. 227–228.
In so far as physicists think of anything as being a cause of energy conservation, it would be the time-translation symmetry of the fundamental Lagrangians of particle physics, or perhaps the time-translation symmetry of spacetime’s structure.
A similar issue regarding condition (a) arises for the introduction of ‘Higgs boson’: it is not introduced as the cause of fact that some elementary particles have mass; the word usually used is ‘responsible’. Even if this can be understood as causation in some extremely broad sense, it clearly is not the kind of causal contact between the named entity and the namer that is meant to help ground reference according to causal descriptivists.
Psillos’ remarks about the changes in D(x) over time make this concern particularly acute, because he thinks that “Ultimately, the reference should be fixed by the kind-constitutive properties …” (p. 228), and having rest mass (or not) is surely a kind-constitutive property for fundamental particles.
It is true that Michael Devitt (1981) offers an account in which both the introduction and the transmission are causal. But as he himself points out (2015) the account is meant to apply to paradigm proper names and natural kind terms that have ostendable samples. And even in those cases, Devitt agrees, the names in question can be introduced via a definite description, a description that nevertheless does not play any role in the transmission of the capacity to refer.
That the introduction and establishment of a theoretical term is an extended process and also a complicated one, with many twists and turns before clarity and stability are eventually achieved, will be no news to historians of science who study the history of how ‘oxygen’, ‘electron’ and many other scientific terms came to have an established use.
Note that in this scenario, our current theoretical description of the Higgs turns out to have been wrong, in line with TSR’s insistence that fundamental physics theory is still in quarantine. It might be correct to say, in this scenario, that the Higgs particle is no longer in the quarantine zone, as we have asserted above regarding electrons—we do not have to take a stand on this question. Even if it would be correct to regard the Higgs particle as out of quarantine, this would not imply that the (updated) theoretical beliefs about it also have that status.
As we have noted earlier, epistemic handles are not simply bits of descriptive knowledge or beliefs (see footnotes 7 and 14). A proponent of cluster descriptivism might argue that the handles can be described, and hence those descriptions can be part of a descriptive cluster. The answer to this is that anything can be described. The interactions of the parts of an automobile engine can be described, but the descriptions are not what make the car move. Epistemic handles can be described, but it is the handles themselves, not descriptions of them, that play a role in established referential practices (and in our knowledge more generally).
These putative epistemic handles correspond to the reasons often cited by scientific anti-realists for the claim that phlogiston theory constitutes a historical example of successful prediction and explanation without truth and hence a problematic case for defenders of IBE—that is to say, for most proponents of other versions of SR, but not for the proponent of TSR.
All this does not exclude the possibility of a fictional scenario something like this: Lavoisier is not around or at any rate does not coin the term ‘oxygen’; as tensions grow in the experiments on phlogiston somebody makes the bold proposal that phlogiston is actually not given off in combustion, but acquired, and that it is present in normal air; that phlogiston has nothing to do with the shiny appearance of metals but instead affects their appearance when metals get “phlogisticated” (oxidized); and so on. In such a scenario a referential practice for ‘phlogiston’ might have been successfully established, in which the word refers to what we now call oxygen. Chang (2012) argues that had ‘phlogiston’ been retained, it might have come to refer to chemical potential energy, or perhaps to free electrons. That referential practices can stabilize, after a period of initial indeterminacy, in more than one way, is consistent both with the causal-historical approach to reference and with TSR.
This similarity is noted by many writers on perspectivism, and no doubt explains why advocates take pains to point out that perspectivism is not simply a form of truth relativism.
We will assume, as seems plausible, that the meaning of mathematical expressions (such as the number represented by me) and other basic lexical items of English such as ‘has’ or ‘is’ have remained constant.
References
Broadway, L. F., & Pearce, A. F. (1939). Emission of negative ions from oxide cathodes. Proceedings of the Physical Society, 51(2), 335–348.
Cadbury, D. (2001). The dinosaur hunters. London: Fourth Estate.
Callender, C. (2020). Can we quarantine the quantum blight? In S. French & J. Saatsi (Eds.), Scientific realism and the quantum (pp. 57–77). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chakravartty, A. (2007). A metaphysics for scientific realism. Cambridge University Press.
Chang, H. (2012). Is water H2O? Evidence, realism and pluralism. Dordrecht: Springer.
Cretu, A.-M. (2018). What good is realism about natural kinds? PhD Thesis. University of Edinburgh.
Devitt, M. (1981). Designation. Columbia University Press.
Devitt, M. (2015). Should proper names still seem so problematic? In A. Bianchi (Ed.), On reference (pp. 108–143). Oxford University Press.
Donnellan, K. (1970). Proper names and identifying descriptions. Synthese, 21, 335–358.
Giere, R. (2006). Scientific perspectivism. University of Chicago Press.
Häggqvist, S., & Wikforss, Å. (2018). Natural kinds and natural kind terms: Myth and reality. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 69(4), 911–933. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axw041 .
Hoefer, C. (2020). Scientific realism without the quantum. In S. French & J. Saatsi (Eds.), Scientific realism and the quantum (pp. 19–34). Oxford University Press.
Hoefer, C., & Martí, G. (2019). Water has a microstructural essence after all. European Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 9(12). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-018-0236-2 .
Jackson, F. (1978). Reference and description revisited. Philosophical Perspectives, 12, 201–218.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Harvard University Press.
Kroon, F. W. (1985). Theoretical terms and the causal view of reference. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 63(2), 143–166.
Kroon, F. (1987). Causal descriptivism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 65, 1–17.
Lewis, D. (1984). Putnam’s paradox. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 62, 221–236.
Martí, G. (2015). Reference without cognition. In A. Bianchi (Ed.), On reference (pp. 77–92). Oxford University Press.
Martí, G. (2020). Names, descriptions and causal descriptions. Is the magic gone? Topoi, 39(2), 357–365.
Massimi, M. (2018). Four kinds of perspectival truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 96(2), 342–359.
Murayama, H. (2002). The origin of neutrino mass. Physics World, 15(5), 35–39.
Newton-Smith, W. H. (1981). The rationality of science. Routledge Press.
Psillos, S. (1999). Scientific realism. Routledge Press.
Psillos, S. (2012). Causal descriptivism and the reference of theoretical terms. In A. Raftopoulous & P. Machamer (Eds.), Perception, realism and the problem of reference (pp. 212–238). Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, H. (1973). Meaning and reference. The Journal of Philosophy, 70(19), 699–711.
Putnam, H. (1978). Meaning and the moral sciences. Routledge Press.
Raatikainen, P. (2006). Against causal descriptivism. Mind & Society, 5, 78–84.
Raatikainen, P. (2007). Theories of reference and the philosophy of science. Unpublished manuscript (https://philpapers.org/rec/RAATOR).
Searle, J. (1958). Proper names. Mind, 67, 166–173.
Stanford, K. (2006). Exceeding our grasp: Science, history, and the problem of unconceived alternatives. New York: Oxford University Press.
Teller, P. (2020). What is perspectivism and does it count as realism? In M. Massimi & C. McCoy (Eds.), Understanding perspectivism: scientific challenges and methodological prospects. Routledge Press.
Tulodziecki, D. (2017). Against selective realism. Philosophy of Science, 84(5), 996–1007.
Acknowledgments
Versions of this paper were presented at the Dubrovnik Philosophy of Science Conference (2015) and the Language and Realism Conference (Barcelona 2017). We thank the audiences for their comments. We are also grateful to Ana Maria Cretu, Michela Massimi, Stathis Psillos and Panu Raatikainen. We are also very grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal, whose comments prompted what we think are important improvements in the paper.
Funding
The research for this paper was supported by projects FFI2016–76799-P and FFI-2015-70707-P of the Spanish MEIC.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest related to the research for this paper or its contents.
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
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hoefer, C., Martí, G. Realism, reference & perspective. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 10, 38 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00306-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-020-00306-9