Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss Maddy’s piecemeal realism, as she exemplifies it with regard to the debate on the ontological status of atoms that was provoked by Perrin’s seminal experiments in the early twentieth century. By considering the central experiments in some detail, by contrasting Maddy’s reading of these experiments with van Fraassen’s, and by reconstructing the arguments proposed by Perrin and Poincaré for the reality of the atom, I argue that the gap between empirical research on the one hand and scientific realism on the other cannot be closed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Wolff (2015) presents an anthropological challenge to the piecemeal approach of the Second Philosopher: she argues that, being the limited beings that we are, we cannot examine each question and position in detail and hence need general rules of Psillos’ kind to orient ourselves. This is certainly an interesting point. However, the Second Philosopher could respond to this objection simply by hiring the required number of scholars to work down the list on a case-by-case basis.
- 2.
- 3.
Being a committed advocate of Perrin’s position, Nye by no means maintains a neutral perspective on the debate and, as will be shown below, sometimes distorts the views of Jean Perrin’s peers. However, when it comes to retelling the story of Perrin’s own experiments, which largely confirmed predictions by Albert Einstein, her account is still canonical for its attention to detail and careful analysis of the research context of the time. Among many others, her research is related by Gardner (1979), Egg (2014, p. 95), and by Maddy (2007, pp. 404–407).
- 4.
Avogadro’s number specifies the number of molecules per mole, it is approximately 6.022 × 1023 per mole.
- 5.
He also verified an Einsteinian prediction of the mean rotation energy of particles, which I have not discussed here, compare Nye (1972, pp. 129–130).
- 6.
It is of course highly contested what phenomena count as observing: for instance, do microscopes count? However, this is not a problem that Maddy faces, as she explicitly does not put any epistemic weight on some event’s counting as a detection or observation, see below in this section. For an early critique of the distinction, see Maxwell (1962). In an earlier work, Maddy does use ‘seeing’, albeit in scare quotes, in her description of Perrin’s achievements: “atomic theory around the turn of the twentieth century was well-endowed with the five theoretical virtues, but it was not accepted as true until it had passed a further test. That further test was sometimes described in terms of ‘seeing’ or ‘observing’, other times in vaguer terms of ‘direct testing’ or ‘experimentally verifying’. I won’t attempt to analyze this notion; […]” (Maddy 1997, p. 142).
- 7.
Prima facie, there may seem to be a third option for Maddy here. It consists in the claim that Perrin’s experiments made atoms observable sensu stricto. However, this would amount to reconceiving the question of the reality of the atom as a question for common-sense realism. Thus, this move would bypass rather than address the central issue of scientific realism, namely whether we can assert the reality of so-called theoretical, or unobservable entities. Furthermore, it does not seem convincing to conceive the achievement of Perrin’s experiments as making atoms observable in the strict sense. As Egg (2014, p. 95) points out, “a Brownian particle undergoes some 1021 collisions with molecules of the surrounding fluid per second.” Given the technology available by the time of Perrin’s experiments, this is just too fast to observe in any substantial sense of “observe”. None of this is to dispute that atoms have become observables now. I am only claiming that Perrin did not make atoms observable.
- 8.
All translations from French to English are mine, unless otherwise stated. I am grateful to Christian Weibel for commenting on draft versions of the translations.
- 9.
Compare Egg (2014).
- 10.
For Poincaré’s views on ontology, see also Ladyman (2011).
- 11.
Furthermore, Castro (2013, pp. 45f.) calls Poincaré’s conversion to atomism “philosophically bizarre” because it is either inconsistent with his philosophy of science or he had to abandon it. I hope to have shown that Castro is wrong to think that Poincaré faced this choice: his philosophy of science is much more versatile than this. Even more, I honestly don’t see why a substantial change in one’s philosophy of science should be termed bizarre, if it occurs in response to spectacular new developments in the sciences.
- 12.
However, I wish to emphasize that, while my analysis differs from Maddy’s regarding the means with which the atoms debate was conducted, I entirely agree with her that the kind of realism championed by Perrin and his fellow scientists is clearly superior to the kind of abstract, holistic approach proposed by Psillos and Sankey. This can probably be explained with the interdisciplinary expertise of the scientists involved: several participants to the debate, including Perrin and Poincaré, were not only among the foremost scientists of their time, but also highly gifted philosophers. This allowed them to combine experimental findings with metaphysical theorizing in such a way as to make very compelling cases for their views. To appreciate the contrast to the contemporary scene, just imagine that Psillos would start experimenting in the CERN Hadron Collider to corroborate his realism, while leading physicists would start defending their realism in peer-reviewed philosophical journals.
References
Achinstein, Peter. 2002. Is There a Valid Experimental Argument for Scientific Realism? The Journal of Philosophy 99 (9): 470–495.
Burge, Tyler. 2013. Cognition Through Understanding: Self-knowledge, Interlocution, Reasoning, Reflection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Castro, Eduardo. 2013. Defending the Indispensability Argument: Atoms, Infinity and the Continuum. Journal for General Philosophy of Science/Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44: 41–61.
Chalmers, Alan. 2011. Drawing Philosophical Lessons from Perrin’s Experiments on Brownian Motion: A Response to van Fraassen. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62: 711–732.
Egg, Matthias. 2014. Scientific Realism in Particle Physics. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Einstein, Albert. 1905. On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat. Annalen der Physik 17: 549–560.
Gardner, Michael R. 1979. Realism and Instrumentalism in 19th-Century Atomism. Philosophy of Science 46 (1): 1–34.
Ivanova, Milena. 2013. Did Perrin’s Experiments Convert Poincaré to Scientific Realism? HoPos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3: 1–19.
———. 2015. Conventionalism, Structuralism and Neo-Kantianism in Poincaré’s Philosophy of Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 52: 114–122.
Ladyman, James. 2011. Structural Realism Versus Standard Scientific Realism: The Case of Phlogiston and Dephlogisticated Air. Synthese 180 (2): 87–101.
Maddy, Penelope. 1997. Naturalism in Mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2007. Second Philosophy. A Naturalistic Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maxwell, Grover. 1962. The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III, ed. Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, 21–28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nye, Mary Jo. 1972. Molecular Reality. A Perspective on the Scientific Work of Jean Perrin. London: MacDonald.
Ostwald, Wilhelm. 1912. Outlines of General Chemistry, trans. W.W. Taylor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Perrin, Jean. 1909. Mouvement brownien et réalité moléculaire. Annales de chimie et de physique 8 (18): 5–114.
———. 1912. Les rapports de la matière et de l’éther. Journal de physique théorique et appliquée 2 (1): 347–360.
———. 1913. Atomes. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan.
Poincaré, Henri. 1905. La valeur de la science. Paris: Ernest Flammarion.
Psillos, Stathis. 1999. Scientific Realism. How Science Tracks Truth. London: Routledge.
———. 2011. Moving Molecules Above the Scientific Horizon: On Perrin’s Case for Realism. Journal for General Philosophy of Science/Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (2): 339–363.
van Fraassen, Bas. 2009. The Perils of Perrin, in the Hands of Philosophers. Philosophical Studies 143 (1): 5–24.
Wolff, Johanna. 2015. Naturalistic Quietism or Scientific Realism? Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0873-3.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gubelmann, R. (2019). Scientifically Defending Realism II: Maddy’s Piecemeal 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_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24524-5_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24523-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24524-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)