Abstract
The philosophy of science is an important field of philosophy, where relativism and realism meet. The philosophy of science studies the nature of scientific knowledge, general justifications and scientific activity. Many of the things I have discussed in the previous chapters are also relevant for the philosophy of science. Scientific realism has been one of the most significant movements in the philosophy of science. However, its problems have paved the way for perspectivism, according to which perspectives (points of view) are a part of all scientific activity, from observations to theoretical assumptions. I will show that scientific realism could not be defended using a Tarskian semantical conception of truth. The objectivity of science is a controversial issue that especially researchers who study gender and postcolonial studies have paid attention to. They propose to replace the “normal” concept of objectivity with the concept of strong objectivity, which is pluralistic.
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Notes
- 1.
For a debate on the subject, see Chakravartty and van Fraassen (2018).
- 2.
We must separate direct observations from indirect observations where different observational tools are used, such as cloud chambers in physics.
- 3.
Tarski (1999) considered his own theory of truth to be an explication for the intuitive concept of truth and to be neutral compared to different philosophical theories of truth.
- 4.
I will lean on elementary predicate logic in this presentation.
- 5.
I assume here that L is a language in accordance with predicate logic.
- 6.
To deal with quantifiers and variables, Tarski developed an ingenious concept of satisfaction. I am not going to define this concept, as it can be found in all textbooks for predicate calculus.
- 7.
This concerns facts as well, but they are elementary predictions: “snow is white” is true iff the stuff snow has the property of whiteness.
- 8.
Quine also calls the indeterminacy of reference ontological relativity.
- 9.
In a private correspondence, and referring to Fig. 7.1, Niiniluoto presented that our difference is that I consider truth to be a concept based on experience, while in his theory, “the structure WL of the actual world is partially unknown and non-epistemic for us.” My main question has been what justifies us to think that such structures and even unique ones exist in every world.
- 10.
In terms of logic, “embedding” can be expressed so that a model has an empirical submodel that corresponds to the observed phenomena. “A model can represent a given phenomenon accurately only if it has s substructure isomorphic to that phenomenon” (van Fraassen, 2008, p. 309).
- 11.
The perspectivism discussed in the previous section is first and foremost related to natural sciences and sciences that use mathematical models more generally.
- 12.
I take Harding to represent feminism in the philosophy science, although she is criticized by other feminists.
- 13.
This is Reisch’s interpretation (2005). Reisch refers to the McCarthyism of the 50s as one of the reasons to emphasise the unconditional impartiality of science.
- 14.
Harding ’s critique about the philosophy of science is less valid because she does not take the diversity of analytical philosophy of science and the debate within it into account. For example, analytical philosopher von Wright’s book Explanation and Understanding (1971) defends an understanding approach to research in social sciences and criticises extending causal explanation to them. By the way, Harding does not refer to Winch at all, which is surprising, as Winch was one of the first philosophers within the analytic tradition to emphasise the special nature of social sciences.
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Hautamäki, A. (2020). Relativism and Realism in the Philosophy of Science. In: Viewpoint Relativism. Synthese Library, vol 419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34595-2_7
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