Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that there is a general problem for empiricist justificatory monism, the epistemological position that the only fundamental way to verify any claim is through empirical evidence. I call this problem irreducible justificatory pluralism: since each proponent of a given conception of justificatory monism is bound to this single conception, it is impossible that one of them could convince one of their competitors of their conception of justification. I argue that this dialectical deadlock can only be avoided by adopting scientific realism. I then introduce contemporary scientific realism, and I detail Quine’s rejection of it.
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- 1.
I have argued above, Sect. 6.2.2, that this is not possible. The debate envisaged here is solely for illustrative purposes.
- 2.
This scenario requires that proponents of specific conceptions of justification, say JE, need to be able to recognize instances of the correct explication of justification as such instances even if they may contradict their respective conceptions, say JE. To explain how this is semantically and psychologically possible, one could adopt a semantics along the lines specified by Burge (2012; 2013, pp. 517–520). In these articles, Burge sketches a semantics where speakers of a language are able to apply a term, such as ‘justified’, without having a clear-cut explication of justification, or they may even apply it in a way that contradicts their explicitly held conceptions. They are able to do so because they have other means than fully-fledged conceptions, what Burge (2013, p. 518) calls “patterns of first-order usage”, to decide whether it is appropriate to use a certain term in a certain situation.
- 3.
Thus, applying the correspondence theory to scientific realism furnishes a first hint that scientific realism somehow differs from traditional scientific theories: it leads to an anomaly in a factualist correspondence theory.
- 4.
Thus, Kornblith (1993, pp. 5–7) emphasizes this article for his reading of Quine as a scientific realist. This chapter contests Kornblith’s claim that a thoroughly realist, essentialist notion of natural kinds can play a key role in “filling out the epistemological project which Quine himself developed” (Kornblith 1993, p. 7), since, as I will urge, it is essential to Quine’s naturalism not to be combined with anything like contemporary scientific realism. Castro (2013, p. 45), whose views on the atoms debate are critically assessed in Sect. 9.2.3 below, also reads Quine as a contemporary scientific realist.
- 5.
Here is a passage from Quine’s late Pursuit of Truth that parallels the passage of paragraph (1): “[w]hat particular objects there may be is indifferent to the truth of observation sentences, indifferent to the support they lend to theoretical sentences, indifferent to the success of the theory in its predictions” (Quine 1992, p. 31).
- 6.
This reading of Quine’s realism is congenial to Ben-Menahem (2016), who urges that Quine, like James, rejected contemporary scientific realism.
- 7.
Another term for the same position is ‘unregenerate realism’, as Quine uses it in the following passage from Five Milestones of Empiricism: “The other negative source of naturalism is unregenerate realism, the robust state of mind of the natural scientist who has never felt any qualms beyond the negotiable uncertainties internal to science” (Quine 1981a, p. 72). Here again, Quine spells out realism in a clearly immanent way.
Caruso (2007) also examines the relationship between Quine’s robust realism and contemporary scientific realism. Caruso (2007, p. 80) maintains that Quine’s realism requires “taking one’s conceptual scheme seriously and owning the beliefs of the moment”, while insisting that the reality posited by the scheme is “constituted by our imposition of concepts, theories, and language”. While his account broadly agrees with mines, Caruso never details the epistemic reasons that Quine has developed for this position.
Furthermore, this reading of Quines realism agrees with Keskinen (2012, p. 144) in its rejection of conceiving Quine as a scientific realist: “with regard to the reality of objects in some further sense than being posits of our science, Quines epistemology does not entail anything […]”.
- 8.
Here is another passage from Whither Physical Objects, which I have discussed above (Sect. 2.1.1), where Quine also suggests replacing physical objects like electrons by quadruples of numbers: “It is ironical, then, that we at length find ourselves constrained to this anti-physical sort of reduction from the side of physics itself. It is this I have wanted to bring out. Bodies were best, but they needed to be generalized to physical objects for reasons that rested on physical concerns: we wanted to provide designata for mass terms, and we wanted to accommodate physical processes or events. Physical objects, next, evaporated into space-time regions; but this was the outcome of physics itself. Finally the regions went over into pure sets; still, set theory itself was there for no other reason than the need for mathematics as an adjunct to physical theory. The bias is physical first and last, despite the airiness of the ontology” (Quine 1976, pp. 502–503).
- 9.
‘\(X \wedge Y\)’ represents the logical conjunction, which yields true if both conjuncts are true and false otherwise; ‘\(\neg X\)’ represents the logical negation, which yields false if X is true and true otherwise; ‘\(X\, \Rightarrow \,Y\)’ represents the claim that it is not possible that X is true, while Y is false.
- 10.
Kemp (2016, p. 168) wants to read Quine as endorsing a species of scientific realism, as accepting that “natural science, or significant portions of it [are] literally true”. While I would disagree with this claim, I follow Kemp (ibid.) insofar as this conception of scientific realism is at odds with Quine’s insistence on the underdetermination of a theory by its evidence—which is a consequence of Quine’s holophrastic conception of evidence. Kemp (2016, p. 170) tries to solve this tension by downplaying underdetermination. Insisting that Quine’s underdetermination is to be conceived naturalistically, that is, as a thesis “whose precise content draws on our overall theory of nature” (ibid., p. 176), Kemp concludes that radical underdetermination, the one that would threaten scientific realism “looks too much like transcendental metaphysics, or even like the idle dreams of a philosopher” and hence can safely be ignored by the Quinean naturalist (ibid., p. 184). In contrast to Kemp, I would urge that Quine never accepted scientific realism, which of course resolves any tension between this doctrine and Quine’s underdetermination claims. Unlike scientific realism, Quine’s robust realism dovetails nicely with the underdetermination of theory by evidence.
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Gubelmann, R. (2019). Why Justificatory Monism Needs Scientific Realism. In: A Science-Based Critique of Epistemological Naturalism in Quine’s Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24524-5_7
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