Scepticism about Scientific Realism

What follows is in reference to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on scientific realism – http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

The article explains what scientific realism is (no easy task, given that the position has been formulated in numerous and diverse ways), and discusses various skeptical positions regarding it (dubbed collectively antirealism). And this brings up my first concern. As the article makes clear, “realism” is a term with two distinct meanings. In its first (and I would say primary) sense, it refers to the belief that there is a “mind-independent world”, and in this regard stands opposed to idealism. Very few philosophers today (including the majority who embrace the “antirealist” positions listed in the article) deny the existence of a mind-independent world. Nevertheless, it used to be a very common position to take – at the end of the 19th century idealism was dominant, both in the West as well as the East. Even today, outside of philosophic circles, forms of idealism are popular.

Furthermore, as we shall soon see, it is my viewpoint that the central problem with scientific realism is that it does not fully embrace the consequences of a mind-independent world. It infuses (one might say confuses) aspects of mind into the physical world in a manner more appropriate to idealism than to realism. All supernatural worldviews, in fact, have this same flaw simply as a consequence of postulating that the physical world is the product of intelligence. If we are truly going to embrace a mind-independent world, we must divorce intelligence and all its accroutrements from that world, and this is precisely what I maintain scientific realism fails sufficiently to do.

Let us then consider the second sense in which the philosophical term “realism” is applied. Here the term refers to the claim that our scientific theories and models provide true knowledge (or approximately true knowledge which science is continuously improving). The key word here is the term “true” and unfortunately (unless I missed it) the Stanford entry fails to define that word (though there is a reference to the correspondence theory of truth). I take it that scientific realism embraces the notion that “true” knowledge is a revelation about the actual nature of the mind-independent world. The term antirealism is applied to all positions which deny this possibility.

Thus antirealism has two contradictory meanings: (1) the denial of a mind-independent world; (2) the affirmation of a mind-independent world but skepticism about our ability to truly know its nature. As mentioned earlier, some of us who embrace this second position go further: our skepticism of acquiring true knowledge about the mind-independent world is a direct consequence of insisting on the mind-independence of that world. Because we think the physical world is fully mind-independent, it follows that knowledge can at best be a simulation (a simulacrum, in fact) tested by usefulness (i.e. the scientific method) and can reveal nothing inherently true about that world. We deny that the mind-independent world has a describable nature, for to assume otherwise would be to infuse mind into what is supposed to be mind-independent.

To call this antirealist simply creates confusion. It is to call antirealist a position which maintains that scientific realism is not adequately realist and aims to correct that.

Realism has become a philosophical term with too many meanings. From the article:

Traditionally, realism more generally is associated with any position that endorses belief in the reality of something. Thus, one might be a realist about one’s perceptions of tables and chairs (sense datum realism), or about tables and chairs themselves (external world realism), or about mathematical entities such as numbers and sets (mathematical realism), and so on. Scientific realism is a realism about whatever is described by our best scientific theories—from this point on, ‘realism’ here denotes scientific realism. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/  (captured June 22, 2014)

 Notice that none of the “realisms” listed include our first sense of realism, the existence of a mind-independent world, and this includes the example of “external world realism.” For to identify objects as tables and chairs is to define their “realism” (or their nature) by their meaning as objects, and that is not mind-independent. This is not clearly stated, but perhaps I can make it so. What makes an object a chair? Is it the fact that someone has sat on it? No, because we recognize chairs as chairs whether they’ve ever been sat on or not. (Beyond that, even large rocks and tree stumps can be chairs). A chair, like a table, is thus a conceptual object rather than merely a physical something or other. It would not exist as a chair if no species capable of sitting had evolved into existence and conceived of it as such an object. Although there are indeed real physical somethings or others which humans and other species can sit on, and we can fashion objects into shape specifically for sitting, these only become chair objects when we imagine them as objects that one can sit upon. This demonstrates the care that must be taken not to infuse concepts (or conceptual objects) into the mind-independent world.

By its nature, knowledge is necessarily infused with concepts and conceptual objects (such as the chairs and tables above). If there is a world that is truly mind-independent then we must take pains not to attribute such knowledge to that world’s nature. Instead, all knowledge must be placed on the “mind” side of the ledger rather than on the “mind-independent” side. Once we make this move, it becomes obvious that knowledge is not something “discovered” in the mind-independent world, but something invented by minds to be “about” the mind-independent world. Why would minds bother to invent knowledge about a world that lacks any inherent knowledge? Because those minds are actually produced by physical organisms that are themselves mind-independent and exist within the surrounding mind-independent world, and because creating a knowledge simulacrum of that surrounding world turned out to be useful for their survival and successful reproduction. Organisms which evolved a useful knowledge simulacrum have become populous (at least on Earth) because of this usefulness.

We are not warranted to say anything more than that knowledge has degrees of usefulness. When we declare a theory or model of the world “true” what we are really doing is declaring that it is more useful than any competing theories or models that we have so far invented. The method of science has been to make usefulness as observer-independent as possible (Victor Stenger calls this “point-of-view invariance”), and this has allowed us to sail far beyond the sensual simulacrum of a world created by our brains (the world we naively think we “observe”). But I don’t think this new-found capacity to generate models of “invisibles” (as the article terms it) through the use of extensive instrumentation and the application of point-of-view invariance fundamentally alters the nature of knowledge. It does not shift concepts to the mind-independent side of the ledger or result in models which are true representations of that mind-independent world.