Fine against IBE

I. The circularity objection

The main criticism that Fine raises against the IBE-based arguments of the realist is that these are viciously circular. The accusation extends of course, to both first-level IBE and meta-IBE:

First, in explaining the empirical success of science, realists typically use IBE to infer the approximate truth of theories. But as Fine contends, there could be an instrumentalist inference to the best explanation, not to the ap-proximate truth, but to the instrumental reliability of theories. Thus, as the objection goes, a realist IBE begs the question of approximate truth versus instrumental reliability; approximate truth can be derived only insofar as it is presupposed in the argument’s premises.

Second, with respect to the explanation of the methodological success of science, the premises of Boyd’s argument are the theory-ladenness of scientific methodology and its indisputable instrumental success. By meta-IBE (i.e.

IBE at the methodological level), Boyd takes us from science’s methodological success to the approximate truth of theories involved in methodology. This dialectical intertwinement of theory and methodology further explains how we come to possess approximately true theories. Since these have been acquired by first-order IBE, it follows that IBE is reliable. Thus, the conclusion of an IBE-reasoning demands prior reliance on IBE’s dependability. In light of this, Fine concludes that the realist commits the fallacy of assuming “the validity of a principle whose validity is itself under debate”. (Fine 1986a: 161).

In retort to this criticism, it is useful to begin with some considerations on the nature of circular arguments. The termcircular applies to an argument in which the content of a premise is identical with the content of the conclusion.

Following Psillos (1999: 81–82), we note that the mere identity of a premise to the conclusion is not a sufficient for the circularity to be vicious. An ar-gument is viciously circular when apart from the identity of one premise to the conclusion, the premise is also a ground for deriving the conclusion. That comes to saying that the conclusion itself figures among the reasons of its derivation. But this is not the case with familiar inferences of the type ‘a&b, therefore b & a’. This is, of course, a circular argument, yet not a vicious one, since the conclusion expresses the commutativity of logical conjunction without assuming it in the premise.

As Psillos recalls, Braithwaite’s (1953) distinguished between

premise-circular and rule-circular arguments. The former ones are only a different name for viciously circular arguments: they typically claim to prove the truth of sentences which in fact are presupposed in the premises. The latter ones have conclusions drawn by means of inference rules which are themselves part of the conclusions. According to Braithwaite (1953: 274–8), a rule-circular ar-gument is not vicious – neither is its conclusion one of its premises, nor is the argument such that one of the grounds offered for the truth of the conclusion is the conclusion itself.

We can now argue against Fine’s objection concerning IBE for the empirical success of theories. Fine contends that the empirical success of science can be accounted for by means of an instrumentalist IBE, i.e. an inference to the instrumental reliability of scientific theories. Thus, the realist IBE, by which the approximate truth of theories is concluded, is unwarranted. The idea is that if you can do the same with less, then it is irrational to do it with more.

The realist does not rely on anya priori warrant for the theories’ approx-imate truth. This one emerges as an empirical matter of fact. The favored hypothesis surpasses its rivals because of the overwhelming explanatory superi-ority of the causal mechanisms on which it draws. Certainly, the realist admits that IBE sometimes leads to false conclusions. But the admission of this falli-bility would be pointless if, as Fine would have it, the realist reconstructed the history of science by assuming without argument that each successful theory was approximately true. It can be concluded that the realist’s first-order IBE (of the form of Putnam’s ‘no miracle argument’) is not premise-circular.

What about Boyd’s explanationist¹⁷ argument? Is it premise-circular? I do not think so. The reason is that the best explanation of the methodological success of science consists in the approximate truth of the background theories.

The approximate truth of these theories is not assumed in the premises of the argument, but emerges in its conclusion. The conclusion is derived as a matter of empirical fact, by examining the fair competition of this explanation with other contenders.

We saw that antirealists suggest different explanations for the methodolog-ical reliability of science. Van Fraassen (1980) for instance, maintains that scientific methodology is the outcome of an evolutionary process in which only those methods become established which have survived the ‘epistemic jungle.’

However, we have seen that such an answer cannot be accepted as a satisfactory explanation. Scientific realism allows the question ‘why?’ to be legitimately asked in situations where its contenders of the instrumentalist ilk do not. The best answer resides in the approximate truth of descriptions of entities and

17Boyd’s defence of realism is sometimes called explanationist because it is based on the claim that the realist thesis that scientific theories are approximately true is the best expla-nation of their empirical success.

processes that include the unobservable realm. It can be thus concluded that Boyd’s argument is not premiss-circular, either.

Let us now check the realist’s IBE with respect to rule-circularity. A brief examination indicates that realist IBE is rule-circular, concerning both the ex-planation of empirical success, and the exex-planation of methodological success of science. If we ask, ‘By what means is science methodologically so success-ful?’, then given methodology’s theory-ladenness, the best answer is that the background theories involved in methodology are approximately true. This conclusion has been established by means of a meta-IBE. In their turn, those approximately true theories were arrived at by means of first-order inferences to the best explanation. Therefore, meta-IBE relies on the reliability of first-order IBE. The reasoning also applies when starting with first-first-order IBE: the success of science is best explained by the approximate truth of scientific the-ories. The success of science in constructing approximately true theories is best explained by the reliability of scientific methodology. Given the theory-ladenness of scientific methodology and the dialectic intertwinement between theory and methodology, first-order IBE relies on the dependability of meta-IBE. Thus, the conclusions of either of the realist IBE-based arguments are drawn from premises established by means of IBE, too. What is needed is not any priorknowledge of IBE’s reliability, but only IBE’s being reliable.

This takes us to a more general epistemological debate, namely the one betweeninternalism and externalism.¹⁸ Alvin Goldman’s (1986)reliabilism, a well-known version of externalism, turns out to be a great help for the realist supporter. Reliabilism about justification asserts that a belief is justified if and only if it is the outcome of a reliable psychological process, meaning, a process that produces a high proportion of truths. Clearly, random guessing does not produce a high proportion of truths. Not so with visual observation under normal circumstances. Experience shows that it tends to deliver true statements about the environment. Accordingly, statements delivered by ran-dom guess are not justified, whereas statements yielded by visual observation are typically so. The realist claims that IBE is a reliable psychological process whose reliability has been abundantly verified in day-to-day life, as well as in science. Particularly, IBE has led scientists to produce a high proportion of approximately true statements.

In the issue of IBE’s rule-circularity, the insight offered by reliabilism is the following: the relevant fact for the correctness of the conclusion of an IBE-instance is whether IBE is reliable, irrespective of whether we know that or not. Hence, we are not urged to defend IBE in order to successfully apply

18Typically, internalism holds that only what is easily accessible to the subject (his internal states) may have a bearing on justification. Externalism removes this accessibility constraint:

justification of beliefs requires more than the internal states of the epistemic subject.

it. This is the reason why, from a reliabilist perspective, the circularity of IBE-based realist arguments is not of a vicious sort.

To be sure, reliabilism is not an uncontroversial epistemology. Its most fundamental problem seems to consist precisely in the severance of reliability from epistemic justification. As Pollock and Cruz (1999) point out, justifica-tion comes from the correct reasoning of the believer: “If one makes all the right epistemic moves, then one is justified regardless of whether her belief is false or nature conspires to make such reasoning unreliable.” (1999: 113).

There is also the internalist idea that we can reply to sceptical doubts about the possibility of knowledge or justified beliefs only insofar as we rely on the resources of reflection, without assuming anything which feeds sceptical doubts (e.g. the external world). These are intuitions which indeed compel reliabilism to considerable improvement. I shall not delve any further into this debate.

In any event, whether the rule-circularity of IBE-based arguments is vicious depends on the justification theory one adopts – point also made by Psillos (1999: 85).

Regardless of reliabilism’s fate, there are some clear cases where rule-circularity is not vicious. In psychology, we cannot inspect the reliability of memory without relying on memory. In logics, it seems that one cannot prove modus ponens without ultimately making use of modus ponens. Induc-tive inferences cannot be vindicated without appeal to inducInduc-tive reasoning.

Naturally, we won’t say that all these cases instantiate viciously circular rules.

They rather bring to mind Neurath’s metaphor of rebuilding a boat while floating on the sea. That concerns the antirealists as well, for their inferential procedures are not thoroughly free of rule-circular rules. The moral is aptly formulated by Psillos (1999), drawing on Carnap (1968):

In one sense, no inferential rule carries an absolute rational compulsion, unless it rests on a framework of intuitions and dispositions which take for granted the presuppositions of this rule (truth preservation in the case of deductive reasoning, learning from experience in the case of inductive reasoning, searching for explanations in the case of abductive reasoning).

(Psillos 1999: 88–9)

Accordingly, the realist IBE-based arguments are no worse than the argu-ments of their critics. Therefore, the rule-circularity of IBE cannot be deemed vicious, unless we raise our justification standards so high that no epistemic procedure can meet them. Consequently, Fine’s circularity objection fails.

II. The stringency objection

In a further argument, Fine urges that a philosophical analysis of scientific thinking employs methods more stringent than those of scientific practice. He

takes inspiration from Hilbert’s program of proving the consistency of math-ematical theories only by methods which are not employed in the theories themselves.

Metatheoretic arguments must satisfy more stringent requirements than those placed on the arguments used by the theory in question, for oth-erwise the significance of reasoning about the theory is simply moot. I think this maxim applies with particular force to the discussion of realism.

(Fine 1986: 114)

It is certainly relevant that Hilbert’s mathematical program failed. Thecoup de grˆacewas provided by G¨odel’s second incompleteness theorem, which claims that if a given comprehensive formal system is consistent, then it cannot prove its own consistency. It was by all means unreasonable to require a philosophical theory to live up to standards of rigor which mathematics fails to satisfy.

Therefore, I do not believe that this criticism of Fine is to be taken seriously.

III. The pragmatic objection

Finally, Fine contends that instrumentalism can explain everything realism can (including the empirical and methodological success of science). He formulates this thesis as ametatheorem:

Metatheorem I.

If the phenomena to be explained are realist-laden, then to every good realist explanation there corresponds a better instrumentalist one. (Fine 1986a: 154)

His argument relies on the substitution of the realist conception of truth by a pragmatic one in the realist’s explanations. With respect to IBE, Fine coun-ters the realist’s IBE with an instrumentalist one, which as already seen, takes the instrumental reliability of a theory as the best explanation for its empir-ical success, not its approximate truth. However, we saw in subsection 2.1.3 that this substitution leads to tautologies, and as such does not explain at all.

Moreover, we have shown in detail that realism has merits that instrumental-ism cannot equal. In particular, realinstrumental-ism can offer causal explanations, while instrumentalism either rejects them altogether, or is content with superficial accounts, in observable terms.

Accordingly, Fine’s criticisms against the IBE-based realist arguments are harmless.

Chapter 3

The Experimental Argument for Entity Realism

The experimental argument emerges in a natural manner from the paradig-matic story of atoms, entities that evolved from the status of useful figments of imagination to the one of real and unassailable constituents of the material world. Section 3.1 relates fairly amply some aspects of the atomic story. We shall then pass on to a more philosophical register in section 3.2, at the end of which we shall present the entire argument succinctly.

3.1 Atoms – from fictions to entities

The Daltonian theory

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, John Dalton imparted new life to the ancient Greek atomic philosophy by turning it into a modern scientific theory. In his workNew System of Chemical Philosophy (part I, 1808; part II, 1810), Dalton turned to the notion of atoms to provide a physical picture of how elements combine to form compounds.¹ The phenomenon he set out to explain was the combination of elements in fixed proportions: the combination of, say, oxygen and hydrogen always takes place in a proportion of seven to one by weight, irrespective of the proportion in which the elements are mixed.

Dalton suggested that associated with each chemical element is a kind of atom.

When chemical elements react together to form new compounds, what occurs is that the atoms of the elements cluster together to form molecules. If the

1Although Dalton called his theory ‘modern’ to differentiate it from Democritus’s philos-ophy, he retained the Greek term atom to honor the ancients. In fact, as Nye (1976: 247) points out, Dalton’s conception of specific elementary atoms differing in weight has more affinity with the Aristotelian-Averroestic notion ofminima naturaliathan with the qualita-tively identical Democritean atoms.

compounds consist of identical clusters of this sort, then one would expect the elements to react together in a certain proportion, namely, the same proportion as the total masses of the different kinds of atom in the molecule.

The empirical success of Dalton’s hypothesis quickly became evident. How-ever, in spite of acknowledging its usefulness, many of Dalton’s contemporaries rejected the ontological implications of the theoretical mechanism posited by Dalton. Benjamin Brodie, for example, maintained that since everything a chemist could observe is the reacting together of certain quantities of sub-stance, the chemist ought to confine his reasoning strictly to the observable realm (see Brock and Knight, 1967). Faithful to his empiricist credo, Brodie created a system of rules to translate chemical equations into algebraic ones, which could be solved without any consideration of the unobservable proper-ties of the substances involved. As Alexander Bird (1999: 123) notes, most of Brodie’s contemporaries actually found it more convenient to take Dalton’s hypothesis as a heuristic model than to try to make out Brodie’s sophisticated algebra. Nonetheless, they agreed that the observational evidence could not ground belief in the physical existence of atoms.

Among the philosophers of the time, Auguste Comte identified the scientific spirit with a cogent empiricist attitude. He regarded causes and hypotheses – including the atomic hypothesis – about hidden entities and mechanisms as vestiges of a metaphysical state of thought close to theology:

What scientific use can there be in fantastic notions about fluids and imaginary ethers, which are to account for phenomena of heat, light, electricity and magnetism? Such a mixture of facts and dreams can only vitiate the essential ideas of physics, cause endless controversy, and in-volve the science itself in the disgust which the wise must feel at such proceedings. (Comte 1913: 243)

Obviously, at that stage in the development of the atomic theory, the atomic hypothesis played only an explanatory role. The existence of atoms and of mechanism explaining the law of definite proportions was inferred rather as a matter of good explanation for the phenomenon of combination in fixed proportions. However, this phenomenon could easily be saved without appeal to any hidden mechanism whatsoever, or by appeal to alternative mechanisms.²

2It is interesting to mention that Dalton also became committed to the faulty assumption that the simplest hypothesis about atomic combinations was true: he maintained that the molecules of an element would always be single atoms. Thus, if two elements form only one compound, he believed that one atom of one element combined with one atom of another element. For example, describing the formation of water, he said that one atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen would combine to formHO instead of H2O. Dalton’s mistaken belief that atoms join together by attractive forces was accepted and formed the basis of most

As Mary Jo Nye (1976) has documented, considerable experimental evi-dence against the Daltonian atomic hypothesis accumulated from the study of specific heats, and from spectroscopic studies. These facts pointed toward a complex internal structure of atoms. Indeed, around 1860s, the spatial concep-tion of molecules and atoms grew in importance in chemistry. Apart from that, a strong positivist criticism against the atomic hypothesis arose from support-ers of phenomenological thermodynamics (Ostwald, Berthelot, Duhem, and others), who condemned it not only for losing its heuristic value, but also for useless commitment to metaphysics. We shall not follow this winding path here. Instead, let us confine this presentation to the study of a phenomenon that proved to be of decisive importance for the establishment of atomism.

The Brownian motion

A great victory of modern atomic theory was the explanation of the ‘Brownian motion’, a phenomenon first observed in 1827 by the Scottish biologist Robert Brown: fine grains of pollen suspended in water manifest an erratic, continuous movement. Early explanations attributed this movement to thermal convec-tion currents in the fluid. Nevertheless, when observaconvec-tion showed that nearby particles exhibited totally uncorrelated activity, this path was abandoned.

A promising approach arose no earlier than the 1860s, when the kinetic theory of matter was rediscovered³ by Joule and developed mathematically by Maxwell, Boltzmann, and Clausius. Theoretical physicists had become interested in Brownian motion and were searching for an explanation of its

of 19th-century chemistry. Nonetheless, as long as scientists worked with masses as ratios, a consistent and empirically successful chemistry could be developed because they did not

of 19th-century chemistry. Nonetheless, as long as scientists worked with masses as ratios, a consistent and empirically successful chemistry could be developed because they did not

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