In defence of a minimalist philosophy of science

 

Note to Readers:

In recent months, I have intensively exposed myself to different aspects and debates in history of philosophy of science from confirmation theory, the realist–anti-realist debate, causation and explanation, definitions of natural laws, and reductionism and the disunity of the sciences, modeling, experiment and values in science. It was not a voluntary undertaking. I have to go through it to prepare for a comprehensive exam in my PhD. Still, I have made the task more enjoyable and exposure to different areas of the literature has helped me to find a common pattern and shape a coherent meta-philosophy for philosophy of science that explain what is philosophy of science really about and what is (or should be) its identity and main tasks. Here I share a sketch of main theses and ideas that hope will grow into a full paper. I have been making notes and writing multiple drafts of this paper. Please let me know what are your thoughts and comments. 

In defence of a minimalist philosophy of science

or

The story of how philosophy of science grew out of its identity crisis in practice

 

1- The Core Minimalist Thesis

Philosophers of science run themselves into sterile and futile semantic debates whenever they assume that science can be grounded from outside. That is, they assume science needs to be saved, and that its objectivity, reliability, and identity must be clarified by a second-order meta-discourse—such as a theory of reality (physicalism, emergentism, or reductionism), a theory of knowledge (empiricism or inferentialism), or a theory of the semantics or syntax of theory structure or scientific language (e.g., logicism).

My minimalist understanding is that sciences fare better if we do without physicalism, without empiricism, and without semantic stability or fixation of meta-scientific concepts such as explanation, laws of nature, causation, reality, evidence, and empirical adequacy. Van Fraassen in introduction to his Laws and Symmetry (1989) says that the task of philosophy of science is to save science just like science task is to save the phenomena. Minimalism is the idea it is philosophy of science that needs saving (from this way of understanding its task) not sciences.

2-    Negative Arguments for Minimalism: Pseudo-Problems and Language

There are both negative and positive arguments for such a deflationary and minimalist view. Negatively, it is typical of all anarchist—or perhaps better, deflationary—theorists to appeal to a Wittgensteinian kind of meaning contextualism. Terms such as reality or real entities, reliable knowledge, and explanatory power and empirical adequcy make sense in the context of a first-order, domain-specific scientific theory. However, when we try to elevate them to a second-order level of discourse and clarify their meaning and definition in a domain-general way, they appear problematic and hard to define in the face of counterexamples and skeptical “what if” doubts.

This is not an accident. There is a reason why this happens. It is a permanent feature of our ordinary natural language and inherited conceptual toolbox that they generate pseudo-problems and demand that we ponder one or another way of jumping to pseudo-solutions. The problem is not that philosophers of science are not deflationists. The problem is that they are deflationists in different and contradictory ways.

3-    Selective Deflationism in Canonical Figures

For example, Carnap was deflationist about a ontological commitment of scientific theories, but not a minimalist when it came to scientific language and the structure of theories. He wanted a crisp syntactical structure to be imposed on scientific language. Van Fraassen is fully on board with a Wittgensteinian–Kantian insight about anti-realism and minimalism concerning theoretical entities, laws, and explanatory power, yet he is non-minimalist when it comes to the identity of science and empirical adequacy. Cartwright deflates talk of laws but advances a theory of reality and capacities of nature, at the expense of loosening the conditions of empiricism from a radical empiricism to a more modest one—an empiricism of measurement.

Despite their differences, what Van Fraassen and Cartwright share is the idea that, given different ways of balancing deflationist attitudes, science would make sense and would be saved from skeptical doubts.

4-    Radical Minimalism and the Charge of Anarchism

Anyone who endorses a radical minimalism—holding that different sciences share only a family resemblance and that there is no meta-scientific unity—is typically dismissed as a nihilist, an anarchist, or even worse, as anti-philosophical, and is no longer taken seriously. Such views might find an audience at conferences on postmodernism or cultural theory, but they are not welcomed among serious and rigorous analytic philosophers of science. This is a predicament of contemporary philosophy of science.

5-    Applied Philosophy of Science as a Way Out

Still, more applied philosophers of science, who engage themselves in specific sciences and have forgotten about—or moved on from—the big semantic debates of general philosophy of science (realism-anti-realism, reductionism- anti-reductionism), have already solved this predicament. They have come to terms with the reality that being a philosopher does not give them a separate method, set of questions, or tools compared to the scientists with whom they closely collaborate. Rather, they focus on more conceptual, theoretical, and synthetical aspects of theory-building, as opposed to more experimental scientists.

That does not mean they do not fit in. If anything, anyone familiar with the history of the sciences knows that science without conceptual revision, creativity, and self-doubt will devolve into a mechanical, repetitive, and alienated process. We need philosophers and philosophically minded people to keep science a human, flexible, creative, and socially oriented practice.

6-    Capitalism, Identity, and the Role of Jargon

It is only in capitalist society that philosophers of science experience an identity crisis if they lack a regimented identity, exclusive tools and questions, and fancy jargon not accessible to the public or even to other scientists. By contrast, synthetic or applied philosophers of science have already gone a long way toward becoming close collaborators with theoretical physicists, biologists, chemists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and sociologists.

These new waves of applied philosophers of science are trained and graduate from philosophy departments into a world where it is increasingly commonplace for philosophers of science to push scientists out of their comfort zones and encourage theoretically creative and socially responsible science without experiencing need for exclusive identity.

7-    Growing Beyond the Identity Crisis

Philosophy of science has grown out of its predicament simply by forgetting about its identity crisis and its unfinished semantic debates. The problem is just that the fact that we have surpassed and grown out of that crisis is not yet common knowledge, even though it is partially recognized. My aim is making that growth more self-aware.

8-    Positive Arguments for Minimalism

To return to a previous point, there are both negative and positive arguments for minimalism on all fronts. Positively, a minimalist stance allows us to do science with more flexibility, creativity, and diversity. Negatively, we return to the old insight that natural languages and inherited conceptual toolboxes generate futile semantic debates when confronted with skeptical doubts and pseudo-problems. The mistake is that we do not recognizing these as pseudo-problems that require dissolution rather than solutions, and instead jump into defending one pseudo-solution against another.

9-    Against Charges of Anti-Philosophy

It is important to recognize that this position is not anti-philosophical. It is not anarchism, nihilism, cultural relativism, or destructive historicism. It is, in fact, what we have already been doing, and it has become the mainstream practice of domain-specific philosophers of science. It is none of those “isms” because as Wittgenstein has remarked philosophy leaves everything where it started.

10- Science, Trust, and Public Life

In real life, scientists do not undergo existential crises over the objectivity of their theories. They argue, persuade one another, and compare theoretical virtues using first-order claims of reliability. In the real world, the informed public respects and trusts science as long as it is not overwhelmed by cultural polarization and economic precarity.

The crisis of misinformation and conspiracy theories should not push philosophers of science back into meta-scientific and semantic debates about the objectivity and reliability of science, as if we had access to a view from nowhere to ground everything. What we need instead is the growth of civic virtues and political rationality in a less precarious economy, not a new philosophical system to ground science or to draw a sharp line of demarcation between science, non-science, and pseudoscience.

11- Critique of the Stance Approach

Finally, I want to address one last point. Van Fraassen’s stance approach keeps the burden of the dead on the minds of the living. The idea that science needs saving must be dropped on all fronts. His empirical stance simply re-stages the same untenable anti-realist position, this time with pragmatic lighting.

The realization that actual working scientists and domain-specific philosophers of science do not take a general empirical stance toward all sciences, or even toward one science, one theory, or all the theoretical entities of a theory, is crucial. Rather, they take first-order commitments to the existence of theoretical entities based on first-order claims of reliability. Both pragmatic and non-pragmatic considerations factor into their ontological commitment to specific theoretical entities. There is no point in buying all the trouble of a stance approach where there is no need to take a stance.