s disciplines, what would you say are the most significant

ways where philosophy and science differ?

Science tells us what the world is like; philosophy tells us why we

should take seriously that the world is like the way science says it is.
Strictly speaking, however, the difference between philosophy and
science, and hence the relation between the two, is
a philosophical problem. There are two extreme views: naturalism and
apriorism.

On the apriorist view, philosophy is fully distinct from science, both

in its methods and its subject matter. The method of philosophy is
taken to be conceptual analysis, and its subject matter provides firm
foundations for science and human practice. On the naturalist view,
philosophy is continuous with science both in its methods and its
subject matter: philosophy deals with questions that arise at the
theoretical end of science and to rely on the very same methods that
scientists use. These two views of the relation between science and
philosophy are exemplified in the tree image of knowledge that René
Descartes put forward in the 1640s and in the mariner-at-sea image
put forward by Otto Neurath in the 1930s.

On Descartes’ view, metaphysics (or ‘first philosophy’) is the roots of

the tree of knowledge, physics its trunk, and the various sciences its
branches. Philosophy—for him a purely a priori discipline—makes
possible the scientific knowledge of the world and sets constraints on
the theoretical and empirical models of the world. On Neurath’s view,
our scientific account of the world is all there is. He invited us to think
of this account as a boat at sea, with no dry land upon which the boat
could be docked and inspected when problems arise. All we can do is
repair the boat while keeping it afloat, fixing it piece by piece.

In my own view, the correct position is somewhere in the middle.

There is no dry dock from which to view our scientific image of the
world from the outside and fix its problems. But philosophy does not
thereby lose its autonomy and significance. Philosophy, I think, plays
two distinct roles regarding science: explicative and critical.

In its explicative mode, philosophy aims to explicate (that is, to render

more precise and more definite) the various concepts that are
employed by science in general and by the various sciences in
particular—and hence, to specify their common content as well as
their differences and relations. In its critical role, philosophy aims to
criticise the various conceptions of science as well as the various ways
to present science, its methods, and its aims. A key object, for
instance, of the critical function of philosophy is to disentangle the
part of scientific theories that is up to us and the part which is up to
the world. In other words, disentangling the contribution of the mind
and the contribution of the world in our scientific image of reality.

“The critical function of philosophy is

to disentangle the contribution of the
mind and the contribution of the world
in our scientific image of reality”
Importantly, the various sciences offer us perspectives on reality.
They conceptualise the world by means of different structures of
concepts. Philosophy offers the space in which the various images of
the world provided by the individual sciences are fused together into a
stereoscopic view of reality. Philosophy offers a more global (but not
absolute) perspective on reality—for seeing the whole picture. Even if
there is no way to put together a coherent and unified image of the
world—even if, that is, the scientific image is characteristically
disunified and disconnected—this can be ‘seen’ only within
philosophy.

Can you give a sense of the type of questions that the

philosophy of science is concerned with?

Broadly speaking, there are four kinds of questions that philosophy of

science deals with: metaphysical, epistemic, conceptual, and practical.

On the metaphysical front, the key issue is the implications of the

scientific image of the world about the basic ontological categories of
the natural (and social) world. For instance, are there laws of nature?
What does causation consist of? Are there natural kinds and
properties? Do things in the world happen by necessity? Do worldly
objects possess causal powers? Are there mechanisms that generate or
support various functions and behaviours?

On the epistemic front, the key issue is the epistemic credentials of

science and in particular the status of scientific knowledge. Science
relies on theories, hypotheses, and principles which typically but not
invariably go beyond the observable aspects of the world and describe
it as possessing a hidden-to-the-senses causal-explanatory structure.
How are these theories supported or licensed by the evidence? How
seriously should we take the scientific image of the world as being
true or true-like in order to have a just view of science?

On the conceptual front, the key issue is the ways scientific theories
represent the world as well as the conditions of representational
success. Science represents the world via theories and theories employ
a number of representational media, from language, to models, to
diagrams etc. Scientific theories employ, almost invariably,
idealisations and abstractions in representing natural phenomena. How
do scientific concepts acquire their content? How is it best to
understand the conceptual connections between theories? How is it
best to evaluate the representational content of theories? How is it best
to understand the relation of theories to experience and experiment?

On the practical front, there are a number of issues having to do with

ethical, social, and other practical problems. Science is far from value-
free, and the investigation of the place, role and function of values in
science has been an important element of our scientific thinking.
Values do not function as methods do, yet they are constitutively
involved in scientific judgements and in theory-choice and evaluation
in science. Feminist approaches to science have played a key role in
uncovering various cognitive and social biases and have promoted the
image of a socially responsible science. Issues about the ethics of
science, the structure of scientific research, risk-analysis, and the role
of science (and of the scientists and the scientific institutions) in
policy-making have acquired prominence.

“Science relies on theories, hypotheses

and principles which, typically but not
invariably, go beyond the observable
aspects of the world”
In practice, all these fronts are intertwined. In my view,
a proper engagement with philosophy of science should deal with all
four kinds of issues and have a historical dimension, too. Philosophy
of science has a rich history, the understanding of which (apart from
the intellectual worth it has in its own right) can help us have a better
view of the significance of current approaches to science and of
attempted solutions to perennial problems.

It is occasionally remarked that the higher the complexity

of any particular area of science, the more it strays into
philosophical territory. Do you think this is true? What
need does an individual scientist have for philosophy?

I certainly think this is true. Complexity arises, typically, when a

theory is extended to cover new phenomena and the foundations upon
which it was built become shaky. This incidentally is the view
Einstein himself had. He famously said that in the periods of normal
science, the scientist might well leave the philosophising about
science to the philosopher. But when the stakes at higher, that is when:

. . . experience forces us to seek a newer and more solid foundation,

the physicist cannot simply surrender to the philosopher the critical
contemplation of the theoretical foundations; for, he himself knows
best, and feels more surely where the shoe pinches.

The way I read Einstein is that scientists have an

important theoretical reason to be actively engaged in the
philosophical scrutiny of science when science seems to be in trouble.

A key task for philosophy vis-à-vis science is to create—or to

contribute to the creation of—the very conceptual framework through
which scientific theories represent the world. Einstein suggests that
this philosophical task requires the active engagement of scientists
with philosophy: it cannot be successfully performed unless scientists
are engaged in philosophy. All this does not imply that scientists
should become philosophers, or the converse. But it calls for osmosis
between the two distinct perspectives.
“Scientists have an
important theoretical reason to be
actively engaged in the philosophical
scrutiny of science when science seems
to be in trouble”
This osmosis was the hallmark of major past scientists and
philosophers such as René Descartes, Isaac Newton, James Clerk
Maxwell, Hermann Helmholtz, Henri Poincare, and Jean Perrin—to
name but the most notable cases. Philosophy gives scientists the
conceptual tools to reflect on their theories and practices, to question
entrenched assumptions and presuppositions and to defend the
scientific achievements.

Read
Your first choice is Understanding Philosophy of
Science by James Ladyman. Can you tell me about this
introduction and why have you chosen it?

A good introduction is like a good appetiser in a meal. It’s meant to

get you excited about what lies ahead, and it should prepare your
senses for the main course. James Ladyman’s introduction is an
excellent appetiser to a full meal of philosophy of science. But it can
also stand on its own as a substantial main course. What makes this
book stand out is, on the one hand, the clarity by which it is written
and, on the other hand, the in-depth coverage of issues not normally
treated in general introductions to philosophy of science.

“James Ladyman’s introduction is an

excellent appetiser to a full meal of
philosophy of science”
The book covers standard material that a novice or beginner should
understand: the problem of the description and justification of
scientific method (with particular emphasis on the justification of
induction); Karl Popper’s falsificationism and its problems; Thomas
Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions; the relation between theory
and observation. But it goes on to keep the reader up to speed with the
intricate recent debates concerning scientific realism. The scientific
realism debate is a key controversy concerning science in general.
Roughly put, the question is whether there are good reasons to take
science to be ‘on the right track’; to have latched onto reality.
Scientific realism is the view that mature and predictively successful
scientific theories are (approximately) true of the world; hence, the
entities they posit (or entities like the ones posited) are part of reality.

This optimistic view of science has been challenged in many ways.

For instance, it is argued that empirical evidence systematically
underdetermines theories, hence it is impotent in turning the evidential
balance in favour of one theory. Or it is argued that the history of
science is full of theories that were once empirically successful and
yet were abandoned as false later on. It is then concluded that current
theories will be abandoned as false in due course, despite their
empirical successes.
 Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Subs cribe

In the face of challenges such as the above, realists have retreated to

weaker positions such as selective realism (only some parts of the
theory, those that ‘fuel’ the empirical successes of the theory, get
credit from these successes), structural realism (the theory gets the
structure of the world right) and others. These (and other)
developments, though utterly significant for understanding science’s
relation to the world, are not treated in many recent textbooks.
Ladyman’s book is a very welcome exception.

Read

Next on your list is The Scientific Image by Bas van

Fraasen. This is a hugely significant work
arguing against scientific realism. This debate largely
centres on the status of “unobservable entities”: entities
that do explanatory work in science and yet are not
empirically detectable. An example of this might be the
electron or the quark. Can you outline why van Fraassen
contests scientific realism?

Van Fraassen’s position is subtle. He does not deny that unobservable

entities exist. Rather, he says that one need not believe in their
existence in order to have a reasonable view of science and its
practice. His anti-realism is based on the empiricist tenet that belief
should be constrained by what is observable and actual and amounts
to a kind of agnosticism about the existence of unobservables.

He therefore defends what he calls ‘Constructive Empiricism’ in

opposition to scientific realism. His account of scientific realism is in
my view somewhat idiosyncratic, since he takes scientific realism to
involve two theses: one axiological and another doxastic (about
belief). The axiological thesis says that theories aim at truth; the
doxastic thesis says that acceptance of a theory involves belief in its
truth.

Whereas, he takes Constructive Empiricism to say that theories aim

at empirical adequacy, and that acceptance of a theory involves belief
only in its empirical adequacy (though he adds that acceptance
involves more than belief, viz., commitment to use the theory to
interpret the worldly phenomena). I said that this way to view the
realism debate is idiosyncratic, since one can be a scientific realist or a
constructive empiricist without thinking that theories have achieved
their respective aims.

Be that as it may, van Fraassen’s key insight is that an empiricist

should set limits to what is accepted on the basis of experience, and
since he thinks that unobservable entities are beyond experience,
belief in them should be “supererogatory”. His key argument is that
the extra risk that realists seem to take by believing in the reality of
unobservable entities is illusory since the theory can only be proved
wrong by showing that it is empirically inadequate. In any case, he
adds, the claim that a theory is empirically adequate (i.e., that it saves
all phenomena) is always more (or at least as) probable than the claim
that a theory is true.
You are one of the most prominent contemporary
defenders of scientific realism. Where, in your view, does
van Fraassen go wrong?

I think a key problem with van Fraassen’s view is that it is inherently

unstable. To see this, we have to reflect a bit more on the notion of
empirical adequacy. A theory is empirically adequate if and only if it
saves all phenomena, past, present, and future. Now, this is a no less
utopian aim than proving the theory true, since at any given moment
of time, scientists have only a finite amount of data available. Hence,
even if these data do not refute the theory, they are far from proving
that the theory is empirically adequate. The claim that a theory is
empirically adequate is already ‘inflated’ vis-à-vis the available data,
which show at most that a theory is unrefuted.

But why go for belief in empirical adequacy as opposed to belief in

truth? If the argument is that the former is epistemically safer than the
latter, then this makes Constructive Empiricism unstable: the
epistemic safety principle, if sensible at all, makes safer the even
weaker belief in the claim that the theory is unrefuted (as opposed to
the stronger belief that the theory is empirically adequate). Empiricism
could be stricter than constructive empiricism: it could claim that the
aim of science is to produce unrefuted theories. Constructive
Empiricism is more liberal than this, but in being so, it sets some
boundaries to what can be known that does go beyond what a strict
version of empiricism would allow, viz., that only what has
been experienced can be known. But then, there is no logical obstacle
in setting the boundaries a little higher, as realists demand.

The issue of observability has drawn considerable attention among

philosophers of science. There is a famous argument, by Grover
Maxwell, to the effect that all entities are observable under suitable
circumstances. Maxwell’s point was that ‘observability’ should be
best understood as ‘detectability through or by means of some
instrument’. Now, van Fraassen takes it to be the case that an entity is
observable if it could be observed by a suitably placed observer. This
claim is modal (‘could be observed’), but it is not clear how the
modality is to be understood.

Are dinosaurs, for instance, ‘observable’ even if their observation

would require time travel? And are sun spots ‘observable’ even if,
strictly speaking, no one could be close enough to the sun to observe
them? To be sure, van Fraassen claims that observability concerns
empirically discoverable facts about humans qua organisms in the
world. But even if we were to grant that there is an empirically
discoverable divide between observable entities and unobservable
ones, we are still left with a question: why should the
observable/unobservable distinction capture the border between what
is epistemically accessible and what is not?

“Are dinosaurs, for instance,

‘observable’ even if their observation
would require time-travel?”
What van Fraassen has failed to establish is that the boundaries of
experience should include only claims about unobserved-yet-
observables and that they ought to exclude all claims about
unobservables. In fact, there is a venerable empiricist tradition,
exemplified by Hans Reichenbach and Wesley Salmon, according to
which an empiricist epistemology can lead to accepting the reality of
unobservable entities, based on suitable ampliative methods, without
thereby abandoning empiricism.

Constructive empiricism is not the only available anti-

realist conception of science. Can you characterise the
other forms of anti-realism? Which would you say gives the
strongest case?

It’s interesting that the key anti-realist claim has been based on some
kind of epistemic dichotomy—that some realms of being are
cognitively impenetrable by us. The dichotomy has been by and large,
vertical: there is something epistemically suspicious with the
unobservable per se, or some aspects of the unobservable. As we have
seen, for Constructive Empiricism, the epistemic dichotomy is drawn
quite sharply along the line of the observable/unobservable
distinction. What’s worth noting is that subsequent forms of anti-
realism were also weak realist positions, since the dichotomy is now
drawn within the realm of the unobservable, therefore allowing that
there is epistemic access to some unobservable parts of reality.
 Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Subs cribe

The two most promising but ultimately failing anti-realist views are
Kyle Stanford’s neo-instrumentalism and Derek Turner’s historical
hypo-realism. In the latter, the dichotomy is between the past and the
tiny. Turner claims that we can know more about the tiny than the
past; hence, it is safer to be a scientific realist about the tiny
unobservables, such as electrons. He bases his claim on a distinction
between a unifier (an entity that plays a unifying role) and a producer
(an entity that can be manipulated to produce new phenomena), and
argues that past (un)observables (like dinosaurs) can at best be
unifiers, whereas tiny unobservables can be producers, too.

“Turner claims that we can know more

about the tiny than the past; hence, it is
safer to be a scientific realist about the
tiny unobservables, such as electrons”
In Stanford’s case, the epistemic dichotomy is between those entities
to which there is an independent route of epistemic access (mediated
by theories that cannot be subjected to serious doubt) and those
entities to which all supposed epistemic access is mediated by high-
level theories. Kyle Stanford takes it that the former are epistemically
accessible, while the latter are impenetrable. High-level theories are
taken to be useful conceptual tools for guiding action rather than maps
of a reality unavailable to the senses. Part of Stanford’s motivation is
the claim that, given the past record of science (especially when it
comes to high-level theories), it is likely that the truth lies in the space
of currently unconceived alternatives to extant scientific theories.

But, for one, this kind of argument neglects the fact that as science
grows, the space of unconceived alternatives is constrained and
restricted by what we already know; that is, by well-established
scientific theories. For another, the problem of the existence of
unconceived alternatives is a general problem for epistemology. Given
that there is no deductive link between evidence and theory, it is
always possible that current theories are false, and hence that there are
unconceived alternatives to them. This gives rise to the issue of under
what conditions we are entitled to talk about justification and
knowledge, which is a general epistemological problem to be dealt
with independently of the realism debate.

Read

Let’s move on to your third choice. This is Peter

Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation. Tell me about
this one.

Peter Lipton (1954–2007) was an exceptionally talented philosopher

of science. His book Inference to the Best Explanation is a model of
lucidity, rigorous argumentation, and philosophical depth. It came out
in 1991 and had a second edition in 2004, with the second having
substantially new material.
Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is a pervasive mode of
inference (or reasoning) in science. The key idea is that ‘best
explanation’ is a guide to truth. It is related to what the American
Pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called “abduction”.
This is a reasoning process which proceeds as follows: “The
surprising fact C is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter
of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true”.

IBE is taken by scientific realists to be the way in which scientists

form beliefs and accept hypotheses about unobservable entities. For
instance, the best explanation of the macroscopic behaviour of gases is
that they are composed of atoms. In fact, the most basic argument for
realism itself is an inference to the best explanation: that scientific
theories are (approximately) true is the best explanation of their
predictive successes. But IBE has been notoriously hard to formalise
and to defend (or justify). Many philosophers ask: what does
explanation have to do with truth?

“The most basic argument for realism

itself is an inference to the best
explanation: that scientific theories are
(approximately) true is the best
explanation of their predictive
successes”
Lipton attempted to answer this question by distinguishing between
loveliness and likeliness. Loveliness is a function of the explanatory
qualities of a hypothesis; that is, how simple, comprehensive, unified
and natural it is. Likeliness has to do with how likely a hypothesis is.
Hence, Lipton unravels two facets of IBE: inference to the Loveliest
Explanation and Inference to the Likeliest Explanation, where the
loveliest explanation is one which would, if true, be the most
explanatory or provide the most understanding.

In effect, Lipton’s strategy has been to impose two types of filter on

the choice of hypotheses. One selects a relatively small number of
potential explanations of the evidence as plausible, while the other
selects the best among them as the actual explanation. Both filters
operate on the basis of explanatory considerations. That is, both filters
should act as explanatory-quality tests. Then, he argued that the
loveliness of an explanation is a symptom of its likeliness. Hence,
explanations that are lovely will also be likely. But what guides the
inference is the loveliness (explanatory power) of an explanation.

He was aware, though, that this was not the end of the story. What he
called the ‘problem of matching’—the extent of the match between
loveliness and likeliness—is still with us. In the second edition of the
book, Lipton made an extra effort to reconcile IBE with Bayesianism
—that is, the view that scientific inference is probabilistic and
modelled by a famous theorem in the theory of probability, known as
Bayes’s theorem. This has proven to be a very fruitful area of research
that flourished after Peter’s untimely death.

Read
You have also picked The Advancement of Science:
Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions by
Philip Kitcher. What is the project of this book?

For me, this book has a personal significance. I was given a copy of it
in August 1993 by my then thesis supervisor David Papineau, while I
was writing up my doctoral dissertation. David advised me not to read
it until I submitted my dissertation so that I wouldn’t get distracted. I
followed his advice and read it in the beginning of 1994. It was a
revelation for me.

The book aims to deflate the “legend” that science is a march to truth
(to the one complete true story of the world) and that this is achieved
by the use of a fully objective scientific method. Many critics of
science in the twentieth century, from Thomas Kuhn to the social
constructivists, have taken the failures of the legend to show that
science cannot reveal truths about the world, or to question its
objectivity, rationality and hegemony.

But Kitcher does not want to do this. In his book, he aims to show
how scientific progress and objectivity can still be defended, even
though the legend is just a legend.

“Many critics of science in the

twentieth century, from Thomas Kuhn
to the social constructivists, have taken
the failures of the legend to show that
science cannot reveal truths about the
world”
This is done within a thoroughly naturalistic framework in which
scientists are seen, not as sole knowers, but as biological and social
beings with various cognitive constraints and limitations. Individual
cognitive practices are integrated into a network of collective
consensus-forming practices. One such practice aims to offer cogent
unifying explanations of the worldly phenomena, where the
unification consists in using the same explanatory schemata to account
for diverse phenomena, like Darwin did with his explanatory pattern
of natural selection. Scientific enterprise is progressive in that more
and more significant truths about the world are discovered and by
making more and more refined classifications of natural kinds.

Let’s look more closely at the legends and illusions that

he’s advocating we resist. On what basis has the idea of
scientific objectivity been challenged in the twentieth
century?

The two major challenges to scientific objectivity have come from the
Kuhnian notion of incommensurability and the social constructivist
programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge. The notion of
incommensurability was introduced by Kuhn to capture the relation
between scientific paradigms before and after a scientific revolution.
The pre-revolutionary and the post-revolutionary paradigms were said
to be incommensurable in that there was no strict translation of the
terms and predicates of the old paradigm into those of the new.

Though Kuhn developed this notion in several distinct ways, its core
is captured by the thought that two theories are incommensurable if
there is no language into which both theories can be translated without
residue or loss. Kuhn supplemented this notion of untranslatability
with the notion of lexical structure: two theories are incommensurable
if their lexical structures (that is, their taxonomies of natural kinds)
cannot be mapped into each other.

Too many philosophers, this notion threatened scientific objectivity

since competing paradigms cannot be properly compared. Hence,
there is no objective sense in which the new paradigm can be said to
be more progressive than the old. Kuhn went to extremes by claiming
that:

The proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in

different worlds . . . Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of
scientists see different things when they look from the same point of
view in the same direction.

This made the world well lost. To be sure, it’s best if we see Kuhn’s
philosophy as a version of neo-Kantianism because it implied a
distinction between the world-in-itself, which is epistemically
inaccessible to inquirers, and the phenomenal world, which is
constituted by the concepts and categories of the inquirers, and is
therefore epistemically accessible to them.

But Kuhn’s neo-Kantianism was relativised: he thought that there was

a plurality of phenomenal worlds, each being dependent on, or
constituted by, some community’s paradigm. The paradigm imposes,
so to speak, a structure on the world of appearances: it carves up this
world in ‘natural kinds’. This is how a phenomenal world is ‘created’.
But different paradigms carve up the world of appearances into
different networks of natural kinds.

The second challenge was based on the so-called ‘symmetry principle’

in the ‘Strong Programme of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’
(SSK). This programme aimed at a causal-naturalistic explanation of
scientific belief and the claim was that, as David Bloor put it, the same
types of cause would explain true and false, or rational and irrational,
beliefs. Accordingly, the world drops out as a factor for the
explanation of scientific belief. For the advocates of SSK, there are
only locally credible reasons, and not “absolute proofs”, that one
scientific theory is better than another. But, of course, scientists do not
talk about “absolute proofs” of theories. Still, there are typically good
evidential reasons to prefer one theory to another.

In the extreme case of social constructivist views, the claim is that

scientific entities are constructed by means of negotiations and other
socially influenced consensus-making processes among scientists.
Science is taken to be only one of any number of possible
“discourses”, none of which is fundamentally truer than any other.
What unites this cluster of views are vague slogans such as ‘scientific
truth is a matter of social authority’ or ‘nature plays (little or) no role
in how science works’.

As socially immersed beings, how much room does Kitcher

have for social influences on scientists to impact their
research and, with it, their scientific objectivity?

Kitcher clearly accepts that scientists are social beings and that there
are a number of social influences on their views and work. However,
he defends the view that the various social influences and biases are
not so powerful that they prevent scientists from abandoning false
beliefs and accepting truer ones. In other words, the social influences
are seldom so powerful as to render negligible the reality’s
contribution to scientific belief.

How would you say Kitcher’s approach to

scientific progress ultimately wrestles free from the claws
of someone like Thomas Kuhn?

For Kitcher, there is conceptual, explanatory and cognitive progress as

science grows. He argues that there is no significant
incommensurability between competing theories, since for him,
scientific expression-types are no longer associated with single
(putative) referents. Instead, each expression-type is endowed with a
reference potential: a potential such that its tokens may refer to more
than one (putative) entity, depending on the event that has initiated the
production of each particular token. This allows him to speak of
reference-preserving translation between competing theories.

For instance, Joseph Priestley’s “dephlogisticated air” has in its

reference potential both phlogiston-free air and oxygen. Depending on
the context of utterance, tokens of “dephlogisticated air” may refer to
either of the two members of the reference-potential; hence, they may
fail to refer altogether or fail to refer to oxygen.

For Kitcher, conceptual progress is refinement of the reference-

potential of concepts. Besides, unlike Kuhn, Kitcher thinks that there
is considerable progress towards a truer account of the world. Even if
our perception of nature may be theory-dependent, it does not follow
that nature itself is theory-dependent.
 Read

Having discussed Kuhn, that leads us nicely to your final

choice. This is Dynamics of Reason by Michael Friedman, a
work also concerned with the nature of scientific
revolutions but through a Kantian lens. Tell me about this
book.

This is, in many ways, a tour de force. Friedman repeats the call of
Hermann von Helmholtz, who is one of his philosophical heroes:
Back to Kant! And while Helmholtz had in mind the excesses of
German idealism, Friedman is moved by a deeper reading of logical
positivism, which was the scapegoat of Kuhnians and Popperians.
This deeper reading is not in essence a reinterpretation, but a
rehabilitation. Friedman unveils the Kantian origin of the basic tenets
of logical positivism, showing at the same time how they were
transformed and redefined in the light of Frege’s and Russell’s new
logic, Hilbert’s axiomatic method, and the fundamental changes in
physics and geometry in the turn of the twentieth century.
On Friedman’s reading, both Kant and the logical positivists shared a
common project: showing how the scientific image of the world can
yield objective knowledge. Kant found in Newtonian theory a model
of how the fundamental laws of nature are founded in universal
principles of human knowledge, and especially in the principles of
mathematics and Euclidean geometry. These universal and necessary
principles of human knowledge the forms of pure intuition provided
the framework within which scientific knowledge and objectivity, as
exemplified by Newtonian mechanics, are defined and defended.

“On Friedman’s reading, both Kant

and the logical positivists shared a
common project: showing how the
scientific image of the world can yield
objective knowledge”
According to the Kantian conception of knowledge, the possibility of
human knowledge presupposes synthetic a priori constraints when
building models of the world based on experience. The synthetic a
priori principles are universal, necessary, and certain. Being
independent from experience, they are unrevisable. At the same time,
they constitute the object of knowledge.

In a similar fashion, the logical positivists had sought to show how

objectivity could be redefined and defended in light of the new, post-
Newtonian scientific worldview that was shaped by Einstein’s theory
of relativity and quantum physics. The transformation of the very idea
of objectivity and the validity of scientific knowledge relied on the
thought that the principles of mathematics and logic constitute an a
priori scaffolding upon which the empirical knowledge of the world is
hooked. Central to this transformation is Hans
Reichenbach’s Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis apriori, which was
published in 1921.

In the light of the theory of relativity, which challenged both

Newtonian mechanics and the underlying Euclidean geometry,
Reichenbach proposed a distinction between two elements of the
Kantian conception of synthetic a priori principles: (a) a priori
principles are considered unrevisable, thus necessarily true; and (b) a
priori principles are considered to be constitutive of the object of
knowledge. Reichenbach accepted the second dimension, but denied
the first. That is, he denied that a priori principles are necessarily true
and unrevisable. Instead, being dependent on a framework, they must
be abandoned when the framework they constitute is abandoned. The
framework is abandoned for broadly empirical reasons; in particular,
when the theories that are embedded in it are in persistent conflict
with experience.

This new conception of the a priori, qua a set of principles constitutive

of a theoretical framework, retains the spirit of the Kantian idea that
there can be no systematic attempt to know the world unless the
acceptable empirical theories are limited in such a way as to satisfy a
set of a priori principles, which describe the basic structure that the
world must have in order for it to be knowable. But these a priori
principles become at the same time relativised; that is, revisable.

This way of viewing things leads Friedman to show that the distinct
and autonomous role of philosophy is established not by the fact that it
is cut off from science. Rather, the role of philosophy is to provide the
(meta-scientific) domain upon which reason is called to unveil and
highlight the rationality that permeates, and the continuity which
characterizes, the otherwise radical scientific revolutions. In other
words, philosophy offers the domain in which the various constitutive
a priori principles of the various theoretical frameworks are detected
and explained as well as the space in which the reasons for their
change become visible. This is what Friedman calls ‘Dynamics of
Reason’.

“The transformation of the very idea of

objectivity and the validity of scientific
knowledge relied on the thought that
mathematics and logic constitute an a
priori scaffolding upon which the
empirical knowledge of the world is
hooked”
The Kuhnian approach to science, from which Friedman takes some
cues, oscillates between two fundamentally different and conflicting
assumptions: the rationality of normal science and the irrationality of
revolutionary change. The synthesis sought by Friedman restores
rationality in scientific change within a meta-scientific (and hence
philosophical) domain, highlighting the role of constitutive and at the
same time revisable principles.

But if the constitutive principles are framework dependent and

revisable, how is (descriptive) naturalism or scepticism avoided?
Friedman’s answer is that philosophy provides a regulative ideal:
viewing the succession of theoretical frameworks or paradigms as a
convergent series in which “we successively refine our constitutive
principles in the direction of ever greater generality and adequacy”
(DR, 63).

Philosophy and the sciences are in a perpetual relationship of dynamic

interaction and mutual determination. The prime philosophical project
therefore consists in seeking the “universal, unchanging principles” of
reason, as Ernst Cassirer had put it.

Like Kitcher, Friedman is optimistic about scientific

objectivity as an attainable goal. What would you say is the
most significant way that their approaches differ?

Kitcher’s approach is a lot more naturalistic and, as of late, pragmatic.

Friedman’s approach is anti-naturalistic: he emphasises more the role
of human mind in the constitution of the object of knowledge of
science.

What do you consider to be the most interesting directions

that current philosophy of science is exploring?

I would single out three (revealing my own preferences and biases).

The first is in the metaphysics of science and has to do with the
implications of the scientific image for the deep structure of the world.
‘Metaphysics’ is no longer a dirty word. The on-going battle between
neo-Humean and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of the world is a case
in point.

The neo-Aristotelian tradition inflates ontology with causal powers,

necessary connections and the like in order to explain and ground the
regularity there is in the world, while the neo-Humean tradition takes
regularity as a brute fact, does away with regularity-enforcers and
advances a metaphysically thin conception of laws of nature. In
between, there are the structuralists and the primitivists. I find the
engagement with the role of mechanisms in causation, explanation and
scientific practice in general particularly promising.

“‘Metaphysics’ is no longer a dirty

word”
The second direction that I consider most interesting has to do,
unsurprisingly, with the scientific realism debate. In particular, there
are attempts to re-evaluate the role and strength of the historical
challenge to realism, to discuss the microstructure of theory-change in
science and to develop new forms of anti-realism.

Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Subs cribe

The third direction has to do with the role of values (both epistemic
and social) in science and in science-based policy making. Here I
think there is still a lot to be learned. The big challenge is to unveil the
role of values in science (in theory-choice, theory-appraisal, and
decision-making under uncertainty) while at the same time defending
the objectivity of science and scientific knowledge. There is
immensely interesting work going on (in relation to issues
concerning climate change and other issues) and we have still a lot to
learn from feminist perspectives on science, including my own
favourite: standpoint epistemology in general, and feminist standpoint
in particular.

“Feminist approaches to science have

played a key role in uncovering various
cognitive and social biases and have
promoted the image of a socially
responsible science”
A fourth direction which has attracted my own interest lately is the
history of philosophy of science. Apart from its own intrinsic interest,
engagement with HoPoS has a lot to teach us about current debates
and why they have taken the turns they have.

With the growing concerns about a post-truth climate, and

diminishing trust in science among certain demographics,
would you say the scientific community needs philosophy
more than ever?

Absolutely! Philosophy offers a magnifying glass through which the

invisible causes of certain prejudices, biases, assumptions, or
presuppositions are clearly seen and questioned. Science is by far the
best way we humans have invented to push back the frontiers of
ignorance and error, to achieve a deep understanding of the world and
of our place in it, and to make the world a better place to live. But
science is not a faultless, value-neutral and interest-free way to
understand and change the world. Hence, science needs critical
defence against excessive scepticism, relativism and public distrust.

“Science needs critical defence against

excessive scepticism, relativism, and
public distrust”
Philosophy can play a critical role in defending the objectivity of
science, in showing the robustness of scientific facts and in combating
the ‘post-truth’ ideology. Science needs philosophy more than ever. In
fact, society at large needs philosophy more than ever. Philosophy is
the living example of the tremendous achievements of human reason.
It is our collective insurance against, unreason, authoritarianism and
conceptual vacua. It is sad that many scientists treat philosophy as an
after-retirement pass-time. Philosophy does not merely fill the cracks
of the scientific image of the world. It is the glue that holds it together.
Interview by Charles J. Styles
April 29, 2019

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up

to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your
choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email
us at [email protected]