The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science includes seven essays exploring pragmatist solutions to metaphysical puzzles in the philosophy of science. In the introductory chapter, “Pragmatism for Philosophy of Science,” editors H. K. Andersen and Sandra Mitchell acknowledge that these essays do not ultimately constitute either a unified or fully developed pragmatist metaphysics for philosophy of science, as the subtitle perhaps suggests. Nonetheless, together they provide “a heterogenous yet programmatic approach to pragmatism” (1). Tensions between pragmatism and realism result from understanding pragmatism as a form of empiricism. Both the logical empiricist and constructive empiricist rejections of metaphysics suggest that empiricism and realism are incompatible. These essays embrace the pragmatist insight that the subjects of experience, practices of knowledge production, and purposes for which knowledge is sought should be part of accounts of scientific knowledge production and seek a rehabilitation of metaphysics for such a pragmatist empiricism. Thus, as Andersen and Mitchell describe it, the pragmatist challenge is to offer “an alternative approach to metaphysical inquiry that is closer in spirit to natural philosophy, closely integrating metaphysical and epistemological considerations” (3).
James Woodward’s lead essay (“Sketch of Some Themes for a Pragmatist Philosophy of Science”) touches on many of the themes of the volume: rejection of the spectator view of knowledge, rejection of a correspondence theory of truth, recognizing the purposes for which knowledge is sought (a means/ends framework), pluralism of models, theories, and approaches resulting from the pluralism of goals, and realism. Setting the stage, Woodward makes a distinction between minimal and ambitious metaphysics. A minimal metaphysics commits us only to facts about what the world is like that are “ordinary, contingent empirical facts that are discoverable by science” (18). Ambitious metaphysics, however, is characterized by appeals to extrascientific entities and relations, “metaphysical” (understood as outside of science) explanations, reconstructive projects motivated by extrascientific concerns, and worries about what “really” exists (18–19). Woodward argues that pragmatist philosophy of science requires only minimal metaphysics. Because the “facts about what the world is like” might differ from one science to another, Woodward suggests a general philosophy of science might focus on those facts that appear across the sciences, such as causality. Using Huw Price’s language of subject naturalism versus object naturalism, Woodward deems subject naturalism to be more appropriate for pragmatists because “[W]e should try to understand what subjects are attempting to do when they engage in causal reasoning (what their goals are) rather than just focusing on questions about what causation ‘is’” (30).
In Chapter 3 (“Trueing”), Andersen tackles truth. She notes that even when truth is not the focus, many philosophers of science make assumptions about truth that affect how they think about science. For example, highly idealized or abstracted models used in science are often claimed to be literally false, based on an implicit understanding of truth as correspondence. She sees this as problematic, not least because it sends the wrong message to the public about how science works and so seems to justify skepticism about science. She argues for addressing the question of truth explicitly and, in the case of models, thinking about it along the lines of Jamesian truth, as she interprets it. James understood truth to be assessed in terms of the difference made to experience. Andersen offers an interpretation of James, intended to correct what she thinks are misunderstandings of him. She then considers what her interpretation means for thinking about models. She argues that the question to ask about models is not whether they correspond to the world, but rather whether, and how well, a model allows us to navigate experience. To get at what she means by this she offers an extended metaphor of “trueing,” where “true” is understood as one trues a bicycle wheel. When we think about an idealized or abstract model in science, we should not think of it as false, but rather we should ask how well it is in-true. “In true is a state we aim at, which can be accomplished in degrees, not a binary of in-true or false” (84). Here we see the means/end framework of pragmatism that Woodward outlines in Chapter 2.
Sandra Mitchell’s Chapter 4 (“The Bearable Thinness of Being: A Pragmatist Metaphysics of Affordances”) also rejects representationalism of the sort that a correspondence theory incorporates. Her goal is to offer a pragmatist realism that is not one of two fundamentalist strategies: a top-down strategy or a bottom-up strategy. The top-down strategy seeks to identify what is real by reading it off the structure of the best scientific theories and models whereas the bottom-up strategy takes the entities presumed by scientific practice to be real. Mitchell’s approach is to “offer a non-dichotomous alternative. What we are justified in claiming as real phenomena are the affordances constructed from the integration of top-down and bottom-up strategies” (104). The key here is the notion of “affordances.” For Mitchell, affordances arise out of the interactions of the organisms (the scientists) with the environment. The engagement with the environment takes place in a wide variety of ways—through experiment, measurement, instruments, theory, model, and data. The convergence that grows out these various interactions is what supports a claim that something is real. “If data from different experiments converge, then the inference is that the experiments are reliable and the phenomenon is real” (126). “What is real is an affordance whose identification is built from the coordination of reliable interaction with what is external to us and the theoretical and philosophical frameworks constraining and structuring what we can represent” (italics in the original) (128).
In “Respectful Deflationism,” Edward Hall considers laws and three possible stances toward them: (1) robust realism; (2) modest eliminativism (laws don’t have a role to play in philosophical theorizing; and (3) respectful deflationism (laws do play a role in some serious philosophical theorizing but should not be understood as picking out a distinctive metaphysical structure). Hall argues for respectful deflationism as the appropriate stance for pragmatism. He thinks that most people are put off respectful deflationism because of misunderstanding it in two ways. First, it is mistakenly thought to require some sort of metaphysical commitment. He appeals to an analogy with axioms in arithematical practice. “The point of having a concept of ‘axiom’ is simply to have a way to think and talk about those claims. And which claims those should be—which claims, that is, end up being designated ‘axioms’—should be settle pragmatically, by reference to the point of structuring our collective practice of arithmetical inquiry around them in a certain way” (140). He reasons that similarly it is not necessary to appeal to metaphysics to justify that laws sometimes can play a role in serious philosophical reasoning about science. Rather a role for laws can be justified if treating some claims as laws facilitates good progress. He argues that this should be enough reason to retain the concept “law”; we do not need to imagine that there is some deep metaphysical explication of why we label these claims as laws.
The second misunderstanding is that respectful deflationism is feared to be too subjective. Hall identifies three different versions of this worry: that subjectivity is a problem because people vary in their assessments of seriousness; that deflationism suggests an arbitrary designation of laws, such that what counts as a law might change on a whim; and finally, that subjectivity implies that laws are not objective. He dismisses the last as question-begging. His response to the first two appeals to his previous pragmatist justification for laws.
David Danks (Chapter 6, “Pragmatism and the Challenge of Scientific (Dis)unification”) argues that although pragmatism is thought to lead to a pluralism that belies the unification of science, this depends on how you parse pragmatist philosophy of science. If pragmatist philosophy of science is understood as science assessed by pragmatist standards, “pragmatist” modifies science. On this reading philosophy of science is typically realist and unification would require reduction. However, “pragmatist” might modify philosophy, resulting in a pragmatist philosophy of realist science. On this understanding, unification need not require reduction. Danks proposes the following understanding of unification as an alternative to reduction. For two theories, C 1 and C 2 : “C 1 and C 2 are unifiable if and only if there exist (consistent) theoretical commitments U such that (a) the constraints implied by U are stronger (not necessarily strictly stronger) than the conjunction of constraints from C 1 and C 2 ; and (b) U is simpler (in some sense) than the conjunction of C 1 and C 2 ” (169). Reducibility is a special case of this constraints account.
Danks argues that realist philosophers have a problem with unification whether they are realist philosophers of realist science or pragmatist philosophers of realist science. But neither pragmatist philosophers of realist science nor pragmatist philosophers of pragmatist science have this problem since the success of science (the concern of pragmatists) does not require reification of scientific objects. Danks concludes by noting that there has not been much pragmatist philosophy of pragmatist science and that this is a direction worth exploring. I would argue that much of Hasok Chang’s work does indeed fall into this category. Although in his latest book (2022) he identifies as a realist, his realism is a variety of pragmatist realism. In addition, much feminist philosophy of science qualifies as pragmatist philosophy of pragmatist science in that it assesses both philosophical and scientific theories by their success at meeting their goals.
Laura Ruetsche (Chapter 6, “Pragmatism, Perennialism, and the Physics of Ignorance”) also emphasizes the goal orientation of scientific knowledge production, arguing that “theory specification has a pragmatist dimension: strategies for equipping physical theories with content, if sensibly pursued, eventuate in contents indexed not only (or not just) to the way the world is, but also to our aims in using our theories and the circumstances we use them in” (180). She takes the seemingly hard case of quantum field theories as her example because people often argue that context matters for the biological and social sciences but not for the physical sciences. She disputes this and illustrates how different interpretations of quantum field theories are better suited for different purposes. She responds to claims that this is due to the incomplete nature of such theories and that when they are complete pragmatic considerations will no longer play a role. She argues that the contextual features of QFTs are what make them adaptable and as such contextual features are a strength and will not vanish in future theories. “Semantic indecision isn’t a passing frailty of present science but a critical strength of science as humans practice it” (196).
These essays address issues that are of interest to many pragmatists and, more generally, to philosophers of science. The book is a good companion to other recent pragmatist work, such as Chang’s Realism for Realistic People (2022) and Cartwright et al.’s The Tangle of Science (2022).
But do pragmatists need metaphysics? Arthur Fine’s well-known invocation of a Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA) raises this question as does constructive empiricism. Although I am inclined to agree with Andersen and Mitchell that epistemology and metaphysics should be integrated in a satisfactory (pragmatist) philosophy of science, there may be a variety of ways to do this that do not embrace scientific realism. Fine’s approach is one such way. For scientific realists of a pragmatist bent, The Pragmatist Challenge should be a satisfying read.
