M. Anthony Mills, by way of writing about Chesterton, Pascal, Duhem, and conspiracy theories at
RealClearReligion, gets at the reason that I support a modest, moderate, considered, cautious, or otherwise qualified scientific realism:
“Duhem thought that “underdetermination” applied only to certain experimental sciences such as physics and chemistry. In fact, Chesterton’s conspiracy theorist reminds us that these considerations come into play not only in the philosophy of science, but also in the dilemmas that face us in social, political, and moral life. Contemporary culture holds scientific knowledge up as the final arbiter of Fact. But if scientific inquiry is not itself a simple matter of accumulating indisputable facts, but a subtle process of interpreting, weighing, and explaining them, how could the messy and complex choices we face in our daily lives be any different?”
Just so, and a good reminder to those who would make an idol of scientific knowledge. But there’s a flip side—if science is as messy as regular-life knowledge, then regular-life knowledge is as messy as science. We nevertheless manage to make our way through daily life with a sense of reasonable certainty about most things we encounter.
My basic point is this: that science is not special. Aside from those things that are present to us most immediately, through the senses, most things are known through various steps of abstraction, deduction, induction, and all the various operations of the intellect in varying degrees. This is true in other “academic” fields besides science, such as history, and it is even true in the activities of daily life.
For example, there are at least two possible explanations for why my trash can was knocked over during the night and its contents scattered and scavenged. One is that the neighbor’s dog did it; the other is that alien sasquatches pilfered my trash for some nefarious reason known only to them. The empirical evidence, claw marks and hairs left behind, supports both interpretations. But add to it that there was also that weird and startling flash of light last evening. Coincidence, or alien spacecraft? When my neighbor informs me that his dog disappeared from his fenced backyard last night, however, one of the competing explanations clearly becomes more likely: the dog was abducted by the aliens.
Joking aside, the point is that the philosophy of science is really just a special case of epistemology, and if we can overcome epistemological objections and reach reasonable approximations of the truth in our daily lives (reasonably discounting aliens and concluding it was the dog instead), there is no reason in principle why we can’t at least sometimes do the same thing in science.
In Defense of a Modest Scientific Realism (PDF), Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal write:
“Unless one is a solipsist or a radical skeptic—which nobody really is—one has to be a realist about something: about objects in everyday life, or about the past, dinosaurs, stars, viruses, whatever. But there is no natural border where one could somehow radically change one’s basic attitude and become thoroughly instrumentalist or pragmatist (say, about atoms or quarks or whatever)….
In fact, there are vast domains in physics, chemistry, and biology where there is only one known non-crazy theory that accounts for the known facts and where many alternative theories have tried and failed because their predictions contradicted experiments. In those domains, one can reasonably think that our present-day theories are at least approximately true, in some sense or other.”
Just as in daily life, or history, or law (like a jury making a judgment), there is no need to accept that every proposition we can come up with accurately describes true reality, or to conclude that all are mere attempts to “save the appearances”; all these “theories” are to some degree tentative or revisable, but some propositions are sounder than others, and some are sound enough as to warrant moral certainty as truth. Science’s judgments, while perhaps much more difficult to obtain because of the nature of the things investigated, aren’t fundamentally different. No theory is entirely and precisely accurate, but some theories – the ones that continuously stand up to test — are at least approximately truer than others.
In The Modeling of Nature, Fr. William Wallace, OP, sums it up thusly:
“For realists, all theoretical entities have existence outside of the mind; for non-realists, all are mental constructs. [Arthur] Fine rightfully refuses to take sides in a debate of this kind. In so doing, he clearly accords with the practice of scientists. It would be difficult to find a theoretical physicist who believes that every term in every equation he writes stands for a real entity. Even more difficult would be to find an experimentalist who systematically doubts all of his results and is willing to write them all off as figments of his imagination.”
And a final quote, from Polkinghorne:
“The natural convincing explanation of the success of science is that it is gaining a tightening grasp of an actual reality. The true goal of scientific endeavor is to understand the structure of the physical world, an understanding which is never complete but ever capable of further improvement. The terms of that understanding are dictated by the way things are.”
