Abstract
In this article, I reply to the preceding articles by Naomi Oreskes, Chrysostomos Mantzavinos, Brad Wray, Sarah Green, Alexander Bird, and Timothy Lyons. These articles contain a number of objections and suggestions concerning systematicity theory, as developed in my book Systematicity: The Nature of Science (Oxford University Press 2013).
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Notes
From my professional point of view, it is ideal when historians of science take a philosopher’s theory seriously enough to confront it with historical examples. At least the philosopher can learn from that encounter.
In his review of Systematicity, Markus Seidel also criticized the lack of clarity in my main thesis regarding necessity and sufficiency for science (Seidel 2014, p. 36). Please note that the last four words of the referenced sentence in the main text are a joke.
I encountered this as a putative counter-example to systematicity theory at the “Hoyningen Symposium—Systematicity: The Nature of Science” at Tilburg University on 22 Feb 2012 (https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/94651d56-b78c-4eff-b8f1-f4a828105932_Hoyningen%20Symposium%20%282012%29.pdf); I may note that I have shortly dealt with stamp collecting in Systematicity (Hoyningen-Huene 2013, p. 210). Also Mantzavinos uses it, restricted to one dimension of systematicity, in his contribution—at least half-jokingly (p. 7).
2017 ICD-10-CM Diagnosis Code F40.210: http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/F01-F99/F40-F48/F40-/F40.210 (accessed 8 Aug 2017).
I shall come back to epistemic connectedness in my comments to Mantzavinos’ paper; see p. 10.
This is what I teach my students. If the epistemic status of a thesis by some author is opaque in some respect, investigate the arguments that the author adduces for the thesis. Often, from these arguments it can be inferred what the author exactly means by the thesis (or, at least, what the author should mean).
“Facsimile science” is a very fitting expression for what I had described as “enterprises that may resemble science, or even pose as science, but are not science” (see Hoyningen-Huene 2013, p. 199).
See Hoyningen-Huene (2013, pp. 203–207); please note that this description of STDC is extremely compressed.
This was my impression of the pseudosciences that I had considered before I read Oreskes’ article. Her detailed case studies deepen this impression.
See, e.g., Hoyningen-Huene (2013, p. 183): “there may be episodes of stagnation of some scientific discipline or field caused by whatever factors, and clearly our hypothesis [of overall systematicity increase, P.H.] is not supposed to apply to such cases.”
There is a similar statement in fn. 41 on p. 10 of Oreskes’ paper: “Hoyningen-Huene’s nine criteria of systematic science (p. 27) say nothing about testability. Therefore, I believe it is appropriate to consider testability, along with falsifiability, to be distinct from systematicity.” It is distinct from but implicit in dimension 4 of systematicity, the defense of knowledge claims. The error elimination I refer to in the sentence from Systematicity (quoted above) presupposes testability and hence falsifiability. In the beginning of Sect. 3.4 on the defense of knowledge claims, I state explicitly that I do not want to take sides in the philosophical dispute about, roughly speaking, confirmation versus falsification (Hoyningen-Huene 2013, pp. 89–90). I therefore chose a vocabulary that was meant to be neutral with respect to this controversy, and spoke about “the defense of knowledge claims”. I regret that this choice seems to have been somewhat misleading.
For instance, one of those inaccuracies is the characterization of the nine dimensions of systematicity as “classes of scientific activities” (p. 10, also pp. 4–6, 11–12); Mantzavinos apparently dislikes their denomination as “dimensions”. Some of the dimensions may indeed be described as activities, but this certainly does not hold for the ideal of completeness (dimension 7), and it is not a good description for epistemic connectedness (dimension 6). Another reason for their denomination as dimensions is something not even hinted at in Systematicity. One can define a nine-dimensional space, spanned by the nine dimensions of systematicity, and each axis represents all the “values” that the respective specific systematicity can take on. Then any sub-discipline of science at a particular time is represented by a point in this space. This space represents the relationships between disciplines, mainly by their distance, and the historical change of individual sub-disciplines, by the motion of the respective point in time. I have developed this space in Hoyningen-Huene (2018b). Another inaccuracy is that I certainly do not claim that “to stop asking the ‘What is X?’-question altogether is equivalent with stopping philosophy” (p. 10). However, both of these points are of no consequence for the present debate.
I am not sure whether it is legitimate to include “world views” into the list of candidates for the subject matter of the Continuity Thesis (or its opposite); therefore I say “perhaps”. The reason is that Wray uses the fundamental difference between the scientific and the layperson’s world views as evidence against the Continuity Thesis (p. 7), so the Continuity Thesis should have a subject matter different from what world views are. However, aren’t world views consisting of beliefs (or knowledge) about the world, so of something that is the subject matter of the Continuity Thesis?.
Hopefully to the amusement of the reader, this idea was a centerpiece of Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, called “the law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa”: Engels (1962 [1925], pp. 348ff.), English translation https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/EngelsDialectics_of_Nature_part.pdf, Chpt. II Dialectics. This “law” even made it as a “causal mechanism” into the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: see Carneiro (2000).
I am not even entering mathematics: many discontinuous functions (in the mathematical sense) can be approximated to any degree of accuracy by continuous functions.
On p. 18, Green mentions the potential of systematicity theory “as a tool for the comparison of standards in specific situations and in different traditions.” This potential has been used in International and Comparative Education by Pietraß (2017).
I may note that in the background of this dispute, there is a longer controversy between Bird and me about scientific realism and scientific antirealism (see, e.g., Bird 2008; Hoyningen-Huene 2008). However, I will not refer to it. In Systematicity as well as in this paper, I try to remain neutral with respect to this controversy. Still, there is no denying that Bird’s willingness as well as my reluctance to embrace truth in the given context may be influenced by the pertinent philosophical leanings. .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds (accessed May 4, 2017) with reference to The New York Times, March 28, 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/science/dinosaurs-birds-evolution-american-museum-of-natural-history.html. Note to students: reference to a Wikipedia article is legitimate in this case because we are dealing with a well-known and uncontroversial fact; the same holds for the next footnote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics (accessed May 4, 2017).
See, e.g., Lewars (2016, pp. 2–3).
I shall come back to this point in my reply to Lyons (pp. 18–19). Anecdotal evidence suggests that more theoretical chemists with a background in chemistry prefer the realist interpretation than those with a background in physics.
I shall come back to this presumed fact that behaviorally it does not make a differences whether a scientist interprets the theory she works with realistically or not, in my comment to Lyons (p. 19).
In its general tendency, Lyons’ Socratic scientific realism appears to be quite similar to Feyerabend’s “normative realism”. Feyerabend’s position does not concern “a factual issue”, but “is an issue between ideals of knowledge” (Feyerabend 1958, reprint pp. 33–34). For a detailed discussion of Feyerabend’s normative realism and its background, see Oberheim (2007, pp. 188–192).
Lyons characterizes this particular class of true claims as “experientially concretized truth” (pp. 9ff.). At this point, I do not have to get into the details of this characterization; I shall come back to it on p. 20.
At least in spirit, Lyons’ suggestion agrees with the line of criticism put forward by Mariam Thalos in her excellent critical review of Systematicity (Thalos 2015, esp. pp. 354–357). Thalos stresses that “Aristotle’s notion [of science] is meant to draw a divide between reasoning that is oriented towards truth and reasoning that is oriented towards something else” (p. 354). She contends that systematicity theory needs this distinction, too, in order to succeed in distinguishing science from activities with practical purposes (p. 356).
I did not write that in my paper because I was not aware that one could consistently defend a purely axiological scientific realism without implying the acceptance of epistemological scientific realism. Therefore, Lyons’ statement that “contemporary anti-realists who challenge the epistemological tenet take their challenges, at least implicitly, as sufficient condemnation of the axiological tenet” (p. 6) applied to me. In a recent paper, I defended the consistency of realistic interpretations of physical theories in scientific practice with an antirealism on the metalevel (Hoyningen-Huene 2018a), which seems akin to the consistency of axiological realism with epistemological antirealism.
See also Hawking and Mlodinow (2010, esp. Chapter 3).
This is very difficult to document. In various workshops and summer schools for physicists in which I gave philosophy of science talks, I asked the participants, typically Ph.D. students and post-docs, about their stances regarding instrumentalism versus realism. Very roughly, the result was half-half. It would be nice to have a rigorous empirical inquiry into that question.
Another way to deal with this case might be the distinction between institutional goals of science and individual motives of scientists. Perhaps, one could claim that the institutional goal of science is truth, independently of an individual scientist’s motives. However, instrumentalists like Hawking would probably not accept this move. They would assert that it does not make sense to claim truth as the institutional goal of science, because this goal is unintelligible—see Hawking’s quote above.
Wootton (2006, p. 8). I wish to thank Simon Lohse for suggesting the inclusion of medicine at this point.
Note the difference between engineering science and concrete engineering work, although there is no sharp boundary; see, e.g., Hoyningen-Huene (2013, pp. 12, 114, 121–122).
https://www.ige.ch/en/protecting-your-ip/patents/patent-basics/what-is-an-invention.html, accessed 8 Oct 2017.
https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/guidelines/e/g_ii_4_2.htm, accessed 20 Nov 2017.
See, e.g., Weber (2005).
See, e.g., Hoyningen-Huene (2013, pp. 63–63, 68–78).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the three editors both for organizing this special issue of Synthese and for very fruitful comments on an earlier version of this paper, including linguistic improvements by Hasok Chang.
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Hoyningen-Huene, P. Replies. Synthese 196, 907–928 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1741-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1741-8