Volume 1, Issue 2: Realizing Realism

Realizing Realism: Review of The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism

Juha Staatsi (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. pp. xiii + 456. Hardcover ISBN 978-1-138-88885-2. GBP £180.

We might ask – and to add, it would be entirely justified to raise the question – about the contemporary significance of handbooks. They are big, heavy, hard to turn over their pages, often make it difficult to browse their contents, concentrate an enormous amount of knowledge on a few pages; also due to their intrinsic build-up, they contain many repetitions, and above all, it is hard to pay their prices for a regular mortal citizen. Despite these drawbacks, they are still produced, sold and bought; their significance is still there to be accounted for. Besides some obvious institutional merits (they provide important publication forum your young philosophers next to the big names of a given field), handbooks could play a significant role in education, knowledge dissemination, but also in searching and disentangling various lines of research.

The most important characteristic of handbooks, if they really aim at a broad audience and want to fulfill the original goal of such books, that is, if they want to summarize the accumulated knowledge, beliefs, and arguments of a given field, is to be understandable, presenting information in a clear-cut, and easily accessible manner. In that respect, The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism (RHSR), edited by Juha Saatsi, is a very nice addition to the growing literature on philosophy of science. Both as a handbook and as a collection of philosophical articles, joined up by a core theme, RHSRaccomplished its calculated tasks.

      The realism/antirealism issue is one of the oldest questions of philosophy. It is tied to various branches of philosophy, and taking it generally, from an ontological level it concerns the mind-independent existence of entities; from an epistemic viewpoint it questions our knowledge of these entities, and from a semantic level it concerns the relation of the language-world relation. To make it more precise and unambiguous, realism in philosophy of science, or scientific realism for short, consists of the following views (for a compact list see page 419 of the volume). The entities that are described (and/or postulated) in the best scientific theories exist in the world, independently of us; we are capable of getting discovering the world as it is, i.e. through (physical or thought) experiments the world is revealed to us; finally, our best scientific theories are (approximately) true, that is, theories describe the world as it is.

      All of this is still very sketchy and superfluous, but it shall not be a problem; after all, there is no such thing as the scientific realist position. Although the papers in the volume are tied together by the catchy words of “scientific realism” and by some general and abstract views about what this realism amounts to, there are almost as many differences as authors. Nonetheless, or exactly because of that, scientific realism is still out there as a living option among philosophers, scientists and the laymen (whether they know about this commitment or not).

And why is it important to edit a volume on scientific realism, having thirty-four different authors and papers to deliver their views on different but still related matters? “Science is undeniably very successful [...] in a number of ways” (p. 37), says the verdict of the first systematic paper. Though success comes in varying degrees and senses, taken generally and at first (perhaps even at second) glance, science is indeed successful in making predictions, providing general and particular explanations, enabling us to make new technological devices, but it also successful in simplifying our inherited knowledge, in unifying our world-perspectives, and the list could be continued perhaps in accordance with one’s own taste regarding the measures of success. (For more on success, see chapters 3 and 20.) If science is that successful – antirealist and even science-deniers acknowledge some successful moves in a limited area – we have to account for that success and we have to see what are we entitled to say, on the ground of that success. 

One of the most important arguments in twentieth-century philosophy of science (at least if one opens RHSR, one will get this impression) is the so-called “No Miracles Argument” (NMA), formulated by Hilary Putnam in the 1970s. Basically it says that if we take seriously the fact that scientific theories are the most successful theories about the world, then if this is not because scientific theories are approximately true (we shall not say simply “true”, as, after all, most of our previous theories are turned out to be either false, or significantly oversimplified), then their success would be a miracle. As there are no miracles (at least for those who are scientific realists, obviously), the success of scientific theories is closely linked to their truthfulness. (I try to avoid the term “explain” intentionally, as it is not at all obvious what would count as a good explanation, or an explanation at all; though see chapter 16 in this context.)

The NMAfaces various challenges (most of these are discussed in detail by the papers of Part Two), but it is quite evident that the philosophical dispute about realism often turns on – or at least starts with – one’s views on how plausible or valid this argument is. This is exemplified by almost all chapters in the first part. So there is near and well-structured reasoning instead of general, all-encompassing and comprehensive stances and claims about realism, something that one would have found in the first part of the twentieth century, or even before. That is, there are no big revelations, sharp a prioritheses, general statements, overwhelming verdicts and statements of comprehensive worldviews formulated as systematic philosophical considerations. Rather, we find nuanced statements, interconnected conceptions about stakes, views, reasons, stances and arguments. And most of them are connected to the NMA, thus to a nicely restricted conception that enables both authors and readers to focus on the main topic and see what is at stake here. In relation to NMA, various basic notions – like empiricism, structuralism, instrumentalism, truth, relativism, and underdetermination – are introduced both for their intrinsic importance and for later discussions as well.

I do not discuss Part One since it contains only two short historical articles (by Matthias Neuber about logical empiricism and Stathis Psillos about the realist turn); and although they are very insightful and suggestive, the history of scientific realism (especially in the nineteenth century) would have deserved much more space. (Maybe a Routledge Handbook of the History of Scientific Realism would be a nice idea.) So, after Part Three (which is actually like a Festschrift to Psillos about his work on realism in the last two decades), the volume opens up “perspectives on contemporary debates.” Some of the themes that were mentioned in Part III are treated here in a more detailed manner; just to list here a few: the argument that there are unconceived alternatives to accepted theories that might challenge them (chapter 17), the connection between progress and truthlikeness (chapter 15), local realism and selectiveness (chapters 12 and 13), also pluralism (chapter 14), models (chapter 19), and sociology of knowledge (chapter 21) get a succinct chapter. As it can be seen from this short list, every chapter tries to summarize a contemporary issue and tries to untangle the often hardly clear web of problems.

      Perhaps the most interesting and special part of the handbook is Part IV, “The realism debate in disciplinary context”, where each chapter represents a scientific discipline. The authors’ aim in this part was to show how can one understand questions of realism in a specific field, or whether realism makes any sense and provides meaningful questions at all in a given era. Although physical questions are discussed, all presentations are much more nuanced, much more specific, showing how philosophy of science turned from general philosophy of science towards philosophy of the special sciences in the last two decades or so. Questions of realism in physics are discussed fruitfully in high-energy physics (chapter 22), quantum mechanics (chapter 23) and primordial cosmology (chapter 24). As physics itself is fractioned, philosophical questions about realism and antirealism shall be fractioned too as the chapters witnessed it.

      But there are even more peculiar chapters, like the one paleontology (chapter 25) – though its title, “three kinds of realism about historical science”, is somewhat misleadingly suggests that we are dealing with history as such, but unfortunately that discipline was left out from the package. But we got the earth sciences (chapter 26), chemistry (chapter 27), cognitive science (chapter 28), and economics (chapter 29). In fact, economics is the only science that is somewhat related to the social sciences, which are painfully missing from the whole volume. Not just in the disciplinary part, but all the other chapters of the volume are entirely blind toward this field. While it might be added that realism/antirealism are usually discussed in the context of the physical science, in fact, the social sciences (taken quite generally to include, sociology, anthropology, economics, or even the humanities) always raised similar questions about social kinds, social structures, past events, intentions and actions. If there will be any second edition, it definitely has to include something about these issues. Although mathematics is missing as well, it gets its chapter in the next part.

Finally, the last part of the handbook contains “broader reflections”, though it is not at all obvious why to call them such as most of them are discussing certain presuppositions of the realism debate.  Chapter 30, for example, treats the relation between theories of truth and scientific realism (note that if realism is connected to true theories, then it might be useful to say what do we mean by “true”, or if that is irrelevant, then why is that). Metaphysics (chapter 31) and epistemology (chapter 34) have a nice discussion, but they also show that there are important things to discuss before we enter the while business of realism. The volume ends with a chapter on natural kinds, somewhat pointing back to Part III on contemporary debates.

As one could see, there are many more interesting topics than one could even list in a review. Fortunately (or not that fortunately but due to the wisely chosen set of contributing scholars and to the seemingly enormous work of the editor which is acknowledged in almost every paper), these interesting topics not just deserved insightful papers, but got them as well! Reasons and arguments are provided everywhere and the reader does not get the feeling that he/she is just an outsider, taking a quick look on the exchange between small groups of experts talking to each other. Many papers are utilizing our basic intuitions and try to draw us into the discussion and make us think about the whole business in more details.

Nevertheless, as reviewers always say, some important things are missing. While one could take it for granted that independently of how detailed your volume is one will raise the “something is missing” point, it is still important to call attention to some things as they document a nice trend in recent philosophy of science. Almost all papers take it for granted that we have major problems with the unobservables (providing thus an argument, or better, a reason for antirealism), while the observables are just fine. Though the line between the two is not at all obvious (see p. 62 where detectable and observable is nicely distinguished), no one raises in detail the question of whether observables provide any difficulty. Can we be realists about the observables? How do our concepts influence what is observable? While theory-dependence of theories is often acknowledged, it is not seen through how does it effect the debate. These might be old school issues after the disciplinary turn of philosophy of science; but still, given the contemporary interest in Wilfrid Sellars and his Kantian philosophy (emphasizing the role of concepts in constituting knowledge and the world), something is missing here. Philosophy of science was just philosophy about science for a long time; in the twentieth century, however, “science” started to dominate philosophy of science, but perhaps its high time to emphasize again “philosophy” in philosophy of science.

Also, another interesting philosophical question is the following: if science is characterized by its predictive force (as many antirealists do this), then we have the following presupposition, namely, that events in the world are following a pattern, there is a certain unity in nature. Does this involve realism in antirealism, after all? And what type of unity or pattern? Structures? While structuralism is often discussed in the volume, it still raises further problems. Namely, that our knowledge might be structural (we know the inherent structures, the joints, if you like it), but our predictions often concern perceptions (“you will see on the monitor this and this”), events (“it should go that and that direction”), behaviors (“of persons and other entities”). How are they related to each other, i.e. the existence of structures and entities and our knowledge about them? Finally, there is perhaps one more subtle position that is not discussed in the volume. One might be a realist about constructions! Even if the theoretical (and/or natural) world is our sophisticated construction (perhaps with the collaboration of the world, as in a Kantian model, or more brutally and simplistically), it is not at all obvious that we shall know all the consequences and properties of our constructions. Philosophers and scientists try to unravel the implicit (or in-built) consequences of our constructions. Thus even a constructivist might add that there is the world and we should describe it as it is (that is, made by us). Of course mind-independence comes back, but as chapter 28 shows, it is a more complex problem than previously thought.

      Without pressing these seemingly ad hoc suggestions and notes any further, let me conclude. What can one say as general moral in a review of a big, long, and complex handbook? Does it describe its purported target? It does. Does it disseminate knowledge? It does. Does it do contain papers that might be accessible for a broader range of readers? It does (perhaps not Part IV, but all the others definitely). We should perhaps be satisfied with this. The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realismis indeed and truly an insightful and understandable state-of-the-art presentation of its subject. Though presumably you will be not converted into a realist after reading the whole handbook, it will be harder to resist realist reasoning without further ado. Really recommended.

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Supported by the MTA BTK Lendület Morals and Science Research Group.