Abstract
A central problem for the new philosophy of science is that of characterizing the rationality of science, in particular the rationality of theory choice. We have seen in the last three chapters that on a Kuhnian conception of science a satisfactory account of rationality is elusive. There have been, however, non-Kuhnian efforts at articulating science’s rationality. In this chapter we consider two such efforts.
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Notes
Toulmin, Human Understanding, Volume I. All references to Toulmin in this chapter are to this volume unless otherwise noted.
Laudan, Progress and Its Problems. All references to Laudan in this chapter are to.this volume unless otherwise noted.
Cf. Toulmin, pp. 98–117; Laudan, pp. 73–76 and 133–136.
Toulmin, p. x.
Here we immediately face the problem noted for Brown in Chapter 5: is it concepts that demand rational justification, or claims (hypotheses, theories, etc.) framed in terms of concepts that need to be rationally justified? This is an ambiguity running throughout Toulmin’s book — Toulmin typically talks of concepts having rational warrant, when the epistemic object having warrant is a claim made in terms of some concept. We shall return to this problem in due course.
Toulmin, pp. 41–52.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 61.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 64.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 54, emphasis Toulmin’s.
Ibid., pp. 122 ff.
Ibid., pp. 146–9. It must be pointed out here that problems evolve as well as concepts. We shall return to this point below.
Ibid., pp. 150–1. Note here the similarity to Laudan’s distinction between empirical and conceptual problems.
Ibid. , p. 152.
Ibid.
Note the looming problem for Toulmin’s account, namely, the constancy of explanatory ideals. What happens when these change? We will take up this question below.
Ibid., p. 166.
Ibid., p. 168.
Ibid., p. 225.
Ibid. , p. 237.
Ibid., p. 239.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 241.
While some of these difficulties are not directly related to Toulmin’s specific claims concerning problem-solving ability, they do speak directly to various aspects of his overall analysis of rationality, upon which the problem-solving claims rest, and so are relevant to the evaluation of those more specific claims.
Ibid. , p. 152.
This point is well made by E. McMullin, ‘Logicality and Rationality: Comments on Toulmin’s Theory of Science’, esp. pp. 427–8, and note 7, p. 430. Cf. also I.C. Jarvie, ‘Human Understanding I by Stephen Toulmin,’ p. 93.
Toulmin, p. 61.
Here, and throughout this paragraph, I am indebted to Carl R. Kordig’s ‘Review of Human Understanding, Volume I, by Stephen Toulmin’, esp. pp. 536–8.
Cf. Kordig, ibid., p. 538. As Kordig points out, there are other problems with Toulmin’s analysis of rationality in terms of furthering disciplinary goals. Toulmin also succumbs to a difficulty opposite to the one sketched in the text, in that his account of certain sorts of disciplinary judgment (concerning “cloudy cases”) is relativistic. This point will be developed below.
Toulmin, p. 64.
Here again I am indebted to McMullin, ‘Logicality and Rationality’, pp. 418–19 and 423–6. A similar point is made in my ‘Justification, Discovery, and the Naturalizing of Epistemology’, pp. 308–9.
The points made in this paragraph concerning the possibility of logical relations across rival conceptual systems were made by Professors Israel Scheffler and Carl R. Kordig in triangular correspondence with me during 1978–9. While entirely theirs, these points seemed to me important enough to be more widely known, and so, with their kind permission, I present them here.
Toulmin, p. 241.
Ibid., pp. 234–6.
Ibid. , p. 237.
Ibid., p. 238.
Ibid., p. 239.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 240.
Additional difficulties with Toulmin’s reliance on the analogy between science and the law are forcefully noted in McMullin, ‘Logicality and Rationality’, p. 429.
Toulmin, pp. 239–41.
Ibid., p. 241.
While I have not argued the case here, I believe that Toulmin’s account of choice in cloudy cases can be made to work only by recasting it in absolutist form. For related discussion, cf. Kordig’s ‘Review’, op. cit., p. 536, and Briskman, ‘Toulmin’s Evolutionary Epistemology’, pp. 168–9.
Cf. Briskman, ibid., pp. 166–8.
E. McMullin, in his review of Laudan’s book (‘Discussion Review’: Laudan’s Progress and Its Problems’), points out the “obvious affinity” between Toulmin’s and Laudan’s analyses (pp. 625–6) that I am attempting to document and explore here. I should note that my discussion of Laudan is narrow, focusing mainly on his analysis of rationality.
There is much of interest and merit in Laudan’s book that I cannot consider here. For a more detailed analysis of Laudan’s account of the rationality of science and its relation to relativism, cf. Gerald Doppelt’s good analyses, ‘Laudan’s Pragmatic Alternative to Positivist and Historicist Theories of Science’, and ‘Relativism and Recent Pragmatic Conceptions of Scientific Rationality’.
Laudan, pp. 11, 68.
Ibid., p. 68, emphasis Laudan’s.
Ibid., p. 125, emphasis Laudan’s. See also p. 109. But see also McMullin’s argument that, in the final analysis, Laudan falls back on the traditional view that rationality is primary and progressiveness derivative, in McMullin’s ‘Review’, op. cit. , p. 632. While I have not developed the point here, I believe McMullin is correct that Laudan’s reliance on “pre-analytic intuitions” of rationality is both problematic in itself and also contrary to the thrust of Laudan’s approach, which is to make rationality a function of problem-solving effectiveness and progressiveness rather than the reverse.
Laudan, p. 125, emphasis Laudan’s. It is perhaps worth noting that Kuhn, too, construes science such that science is not a truth-seeking activity — though not in the context of developing an account of the rationality of science, as do Toulmin and Laudan. For discussion of this aspect of Kuhn, cf. Shimony, ‘Comments on Two Epistemological Theses of Thomas Kuhn’, and Chapter 4, A, above.
McMullin, ‘Review’, p. 627.
Laudan, p. 146.
Ibid., emphasis Laudan’s.
Ibid. , p. 144, emphasis Laudan’s.
A more detailed account of the Dalton/pre-Dalton case, especially with respect to the possibility of assessing the rationality of rival research traditions and paradigms, can be found in my ‘On the Parallel Between Piagetian Cognitive Development and the History of Science’, and in this volume, Chapter 4, B, regarding my exchange with Gerald Doppelt.
This point is made in Kordig, ‘Progress Requires Invariance.’
Discussion of similar difficulties for Kuhn’s attempt to account for progress in science across revolutions in terms of a paradigm’s internal problem-solving ability can be found in Chapter 4, A, above.
The relativistic tendency of Laudan’s analysis is clearly developed in Doppelt, ‘Laudan’s Pragmatic Alternative to Positivist and Historicist Theories of Science,’ esp. pp. 264–267. It is perhaps worth pointing out related difficulties with Laudan’s discussion of standards of rationality. Laudan criticizes Scheffler’s view that there are constant, time-independent standards of rational appraisal. (Scheffler speaks of a “constancy of logic and method, which unifies” different scientific periods.) Laudan criticizes this view on the grounds that “such components of rational appraisal as criteria of explanation, views about scientific testing, beliefs about the methods of inductive inference and the like have undergone enormous transformations.” (p. 129). There are two points which need to be made here. First, despite Laudan’s criticism of methodological constancy, he applauds his own account of rationality for accommodating “the more general, time-independent features of rational decision making” (p. 131). Problem-solving effectiveness is itself a methodological constant of precisely the sort Laudan seems to want to disallow. Second, Laudan’s criticism of Scheffler is not quite fair, because Scheffler’s position is entirely compatible with the sorts of “enormous transformations” Laudan notes. Scheffler’s view is not that views concerning what counts as inductive support, proper test, satisfactory explanation and so on never change. It is rather that methodological constancy involves not specific construals of various methodological criteria, but a general commitment to rational procedures and standards without which the entire enterprise of science would be impossible. Cf. here cogent relevant discussion in A. Musgrave, ‘Problems with Progress,’ esp. pp. 451–2 and 456–9.
This last point, that problem-solving effectiveness cannot serve as a tradition-neutral criterion for evaluating research traditions, is well made in G. Gutting’s review of Laudan, ‘Review of Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems’ , p. 99; and also in Kordig, ‘Progress Requires Invariance’. See also the problem with Laudan’s apparatus for assessing a theory’s problem-solving effectiveness raised (briefly) in Glymour, Theory and Evidence, pp. 100–1. Criticism of Toulmin analogous to that raised in the above paragraph against Laudan is made in Kordig’s ‘Review’, op. cit.
Toulmin, pp. 168–173.
Kordig, ‘Review’, p. 539.
Toulmin seems to accept this point (p. 173), without realizing that it contradicts his earlier (pp. 169–171) denial of it.
Laudan, p. 125, emphasis Laudan’s.
Ibid. , emphasis Laudan’s. Laudan continues this passage by despairing of efforts to relate rationality with approximations to the truth or probable truth, but for present purposes we may ignore this aspect of Laudan’s discussion.
Cf. Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity, chap 5, esp. pp. 121–4. Though Scheffler’s argument here concerns the problem of reference, his distinction between the methods of establishing truth and the import or purport of such establishment is parallel to the distinction I am drawing in the text. A similar point with respect to simplicity is made by Nelson Goodman, Problems and Projects, p. 280. Cf. also Firth, ‘Epistemic Merit, Intrinsic and Instrumental’, esp. p. 19.
Laudan’s later remarks concerning the need for a truth-independent account ot rationality fail to improve his original argument. In his ‘Views of Progress: Separating the Pilgrims from the Rakes’, pp. 277–8, Laudan reformulates the argument that the truth of a theory cannot provide us with grounds for rationally accepting a theory, so that truth cannot be appealed to as evidence for rational belief, and so that the rationality of science cannot be established in terms of science’s achieving (approximately) true theories. But this reformulation fails to carry Laudan’s view forward, because it again reverses the relation between rationality and truth.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that Laudan grants (p. 82) that “one can conceive that a research tradition might be true,” but holds that the success of a successful (i.e., problem-solving effective) tradition does not reflect on that tradition’s truth. But, as we have seen, such success does count for Laudan as grounds for rational belief in a tradition (p. 124) — that is, for Laudan it is rational to accept those research traditions which are maximally progressive and problem-solving effective. Granting that point, and given the argument just sketched in the text, it is not clear why Laudan is not committed to the conclusion that progressiveness and problem-solving effectiveness, in providing good reason for accepting research traditions, provides grounds for the truth of those traditions as well.
Musgrave, ‘Problems with Progress’, p. 460.
Musgrave, ‘Problems with Progress’, p. 460; Gutting, ‘Review’, p. 96.
McMullin, ‘Review’, pp. 633–5; Gutting, ‘Review’, p. 97.
Gutting, ‘Review’, pp. 97–8. Cf. also my ‘What is the Question Concerning the Rationality of Science?’.
Laudan, p. 225.
Musgrave, ‘Problems with Progress’, pp. 460–1; Gutting, ‘Review’, p. 98.
Several writers besides the ones just cited have pointed to this problem for Laudan. Cf. also, for example, the papers by D.L. Hull, A. Lugg, and R.E. Butts in the review symposium on Laudan, in Philosophy of the Social Sciences of December 1979 (Hull, ‘Laudan’s Progress and Its Problems’; Lugg, ‘Laudan and the Problem-Solving Approach to Scientific Progress and Rationality’; and Butts, ‘Scientific Progress: The Laudan Manifesto’, esp. pp. 462–4 and 473–4. Laudan has attempted, unsuccessfully in my view, to deflect this criticism. Cf. his ‘Problems, Truth, and Consistency,’ and references therein.
The suggestion here, that we explain a theory’s success (understood as problem-solving effectiveness) in terms of truth, is a part of the ‘Putnam-Boyd thesis’ that realism is an empirical hypothesis which explains the success of science. Cf. Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, and Skagestad, ‘Pragmatic Realism: The Peircean Argument Reexamined’, esp. pp. 527–9.
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Siegel, H. (1987). The Un-Kuhnians: Relativism via the Problem-Solving Theory of Rationality. In: Relativism Refuted. Synthese Library, vol 189. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7746-5_6
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