Some Problems of Epistemic Pluralism

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Some Problems of Epistemic Pluralism Jose Carlos Cañizares

Abstract: In this essay I will argue against Nancy Cartwright's normative thesis that we should try to escape the fascination of big, unified and hierarchical pictures of the world. I will oppose this normative thesis, and my reason to do so will be that there is a fundamental demand of the mind that asks for some such picture as a framework of self-interpretation. Big pictures articulate meanings and help us situating ourselves in the world, thus facilitating decision-making. The fact that there is some such psychological need for big and coherent pictures make it desirable that these be scientifically informed rather than based in superstitious, obsolete and, more generally, common sense beliefs. The demand for unified accounts of nature and human knowledge is one for empowerment.

Nancy Cartwright advises us against building a unified scheme of understanding or a coordinated picture of all our best scientific theories (Cartwright 1999). Her thesis, however, does not consist in this simple normative formulation. Rather, that is her personal conclusion from another, and very different, descriptive thesis, together with two additional premises. Before countering her argument let us analyze the premises of Cartwright’s argument. According to the first premise, the picture that the sciences present us with is not that of a unified pyramid, but rather that of a patchwork. The deductive-nomological account, which some philosophers –for instance, Hempel or Popper- had once hoped for, tells us that science is a true (or, at least, reliable) representation of the world such that, starting with a few principles and a progressively detailed account of different circumstances, we should be able to compose a unitary and explicit image of the world which is valid for all possible situations. The scientist would then be someone who is discovering the fundamental laws of nature and the basic structure of the world, all of which is ultimately reducible to a few principles supporting his whole theoretical framework. Cartwright’s argument is that this is simply not what we see in real science. Instead of a pyramid of principles from which theories, models and, eventually, phenomenological laws follow, what we find is a manifold of theories with clearly defined and restricted domains. Sometimes there is collaboration between close or distant domains, and it may happen that the borders of a theory expand or contract depending on the phenomena we seek to apprehend. There is, however, no fundamental unity underlying this theoretical mess, and every attempt to produce some such unity is condemned to failure. In the meantime, the formalist spirit of the scientist or the philosopher committed to unification will fill the 1

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world up with new properties and mathematical structures of all sorts. But nothing is gained from this. The second premise of the argument is not a descriptive thesis nor does it follow from Cartwright’s research in the different sciences. I think that its status is that of a hypothesis in the psychology and the sociology of science. It is a very plausible hypothesis, though. It says that the so-called theories-of-everything “get an extra dollop of support beyond anything they have earned by their empirical success or the empirically warranted promise of their research programme” just for the reason that they are thought “to be able in principle to explain everything of a certain kind” (Cartwright 1999, 17). And here is where Cartwright’s third premise, this time a strictly normative one, slips in. As theories of everything actually are manifestly wrong many times, which makes sense given the generally dappled nature of the world and the irreducible multiplicity of our theories about it, the fact that they get more support than they would get out of their mere empirical success, means that other theories and approaches that do not promise such unification will be discriminated. Thus, while lots of resources are spoilt in theories of everything, many urgent and pressing problems such as specific diseases or environmental issues will not receive the due optimal treatment; this, of course, has to be seen as a consequence of the irrational and unjustifiable preference for a global and unified scheme. This is how Cartwright thinks that her normative thesis, asking us to avoid global and unified schemes, is supported by a mistaken and generalized view of science, together with the irrational and impractical economic and social trend that follows from it. First of all I will address Cartwright’s descriptive thesis, and relate it to other traditional problems in philosophy. This thesis is one of descriptive pluralism. Throughout history, many philosophers have thought of science and, more generally, of human knowledge, in very similar terms to Cartwright’s. In her text, Cartwright cites Otto Neurath and John Dupré (Cartwright 1999), but Kuhn, Bachelard or Foucault have too defended a like conception of the sciences. In general, epistemological pluralism has traditionally been associated with one or other version of epistemological empiricism, or nominalism about concepts. In contrast, rationalistic and formalistic philosophers, such as Descartes, Spinoza or Russell, have always tended to some sort of commitment with the unity of explanation, the unity of conception or the unity of reality. One ally of views of this sort is usually some brand of Platonism1. When to this commitment with unity we add a commitment to 1

This does not hold in the case of Spinoza, who was both an ontological and an epistemological monist despite the fact that the core of his conception was a sophisticated brand of (anti-Platonic) atomism – however, Cassirer accounts very well for the ultimately monistic nature of atomistic philosophy, already since Democritus (Cassirer 1923). Spinoza’s conception of the unity of the manifold (infinite) modes in God is complex and idiosyncratic. However, he shows, better than anyone, that philosophical conceptions can be both pluralistic and monistic and that everything depends on how you logically organize your ontological commitments. For instance, Cartwright herself seems to believe in the existence of some (one) material world which is identifiable as such even when our multiplicity of theories about it is utterly irreductible. Thus, for her the world is dappled -very much in the spirit of a sophisticated atomism of “casual material encounters”-

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realism, such as we find in Aristotle or Aquinas, then one no longer speaks of the unity of the soul –or, the unity of sciences as granted by that of the natural light of human reason, like Descartes does (Descartes 1993; Cañizares 2015a)- but rather of the existence of an unity called universe (where unity is in fact implied by the very use of the term) or the unity of Creation (the unity of creatures as creatures of a Creator). After Kant and his Copernican turn, however, things started to look different. In his transcendental line of reasoning, Kant could take both empiricism and rationalism to be extreme metaphysical positions, each of which called for a typical philosophical temperament. While empiricists were inclined to satisfy the demands of experience in all its multiplicity and quality, rationalists would tend to embrace views that highlight the ultimate unity existing behind that multiplicity, unity which would perhaps call for the need to speak of a more fundamental stratum of reality, whose structures can be captured by scientific laws. Eventually both demands were complementary and entirely relative to the philosophical temperament of the author. In our mundane experience, however, we never encounter the absolutely irrational and fortuitous manifold of the empiricist, nor do we find the totalizing and coherent unity of the rationalist, but always a mixture of one and another that comes in varying degrees. What is the current predicament of Kant’s system in the academia, and in what terms this or that of his assertions is justified, that is a matter for a different discussion. However, I think that this basic Kantian idea I have just outlined remains interesting and, possibly, explanatory. So, both the defense of the radical plurality of beings, or manifolds, and the commitment to an ultimate and underlying unity of Being are nothing but extreme tendencies of the mind, demands of two different sorts of human sensibilities, and therefore positions to be negotiated in the face of challenges for joint action in our social life. In fact, Cartwright’s account requires some careful qualifications. In principle, one can commit oneself to a materialistic orientation that no longer takes its root in a unified and more or less scientific conception of matter (or energy) but rather in the relationship between activity and ideas. I believe that Cartwright’s scientific pluralism is one such sort of materialism2, according to which ideas do not have either an autonomous development or a constitutive role for the nature of objects. Let me pursue this line of argument and consider the idea that some set of scientific theories is necessary and sufficient to effectively organize and give consistency to a given scientific activity. If that is your opinion, then it seems that the idea of a unified science will make sense to you. You can think, however, and so does Cartwright, that in most if not all enquiries a non-conceptual,

but, nonetheless, we can speak of a dappled world and not just of a nonsensical and random dance of stuff where all order comes exclusively from the (restricted, local, ceteris paribus) scientific accounts that we make of it (Cartwright 1999). 2 Cartwright seems to juggle her epistemological pluralism with a metaphysical or ontological monism about the world –messy but one, one though in messiness (see note 1, above).

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yet epistemic component intervenes, which is essential for the development of ideas and explanations. Let me call this component "practical" or "tacit" knowledge. In this second conception, the logical organization of science does not produce a unity by itself; all unification of ideas is indeed shown to be regulatory and partial, as it ultimately depends on the practical knowledge that the given epistemic activity is about. Moreover, if at some point the results of our research lead us to introduce new ways of dealing with the objects, and thus, new practices, ideas would have to accommodate to this evolution of practice. Any desired unification should be produced, without ever being guaranteed beforehand. The medieval often spoke of God in these terms: the unity of things in God was not for them logical, but analogical. Therefore, and with regards to the unity of the sciences, we would have a very similar picture to Wittgenstein’s family resemblances between language games and between games in general. What is science or what is scientific would be defined by a set of practices more or less similar to one other, such as can be recognizably so by its professionals; however, it would be very difficult, if possible at all, to find objective criteria (in content or in method) that all of those practices would meet with no exception. Our tacit skills and, more particularly, the tacit skills of practitioners are that determine what science is and what is not. Personally, I take this to be a correct approach, and therefore I assume that a possible unification of science would not be logical; thus, as some medievals did with God, I think that such unity would rather be analogical. Indeed, lately it has become a typical resource for empiricists to stress the effective plurality of modes of knowledge, methods, and so on, and to insist that the tacit knowledge of the expert is ultimately the eminent class among those, the only one that provides possible (and restricted) unities of practice or of concept. Kuhn made use of a similar concept in his account of scientific learning by indoctrination through exemplars, and Cartwright here makes the due tribute to stereotypes and knowhow -one of which would be know-how of detecting stereotypical situations- (Cartwright 1999, 10). Know-how is hardly distinguishable from tacit knowledge and many philosophers and academics use them interchangeably. However, tacit knowledge is a rather obscure category. Psychologists, in fact, have had recurrent problems in fleshing out this concept (Cañizares 2014). This may well be due to the fact that it takes its content only from a contrast to explicit knowledge: tacit or implicit knowledge would basically be any knowledge which is not-explicit, which "you learn by doing"; that is, any knowledge that is observational and manipulative and, in short, that is not reportable, but that is nevertheless necessary to understand any piece of the relevant explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge, in short, only applies to a given activity provided that it is accompanied by the indispensable tacit knowledge. In turn, this obscure and unanalyzable knowledge is precisely the piece of knowledge that seems to prevent the possibility of logical or conceptual unity.

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I have so far offered two possible grounds for doubting or, at least, nuancing Cartwright’s descriptive thesis. First, the empiricist sensibility is, in Kantian terms, just as much a regulative ideal as systematic rationalism is. Second, in order for the mind to provide more or less unified accounts of nature, there must be some pre-existing order in nature and, presumably, when we speak about our learned tacit skills, we do not merely address a capacity of the human mind to put order into things, but a true orderly connection of the mind with nature’s dealings, which would themselves be orderly3. These are legitimate doubts that a detailed discussion on Cartwright’s descriptive thesis should address. I will not dispute that thesis, however; I grant Cartwright the point. I certainly do not believe in the possibility of logically unifying science, not least because the parts of science, or its various fields and branches if you will, cannot be linked to one another in a coherent whole where from physical principles one infers all the phenomena studied by chemistry, biology and so on. I contend, however, that one can and should believe in more or less vague regulative ideas about how all the disciplines coordinate with one another in content, thus providing a coherent picture of the world that can guide selfinterpretation. Firstly, this intelligibility has, sometimes, a methodological counterpart grounding and enabling interdisciplinary practice. This is what we see when the justification of an evolutionary argument relies on the dating of bones or fragments of genome that only the application of physical methods, such as carbon-14, may grant. That this method is applied and considered as a sufficient justification for the relevant dating, means that the equations of the disintegration of carbon hold in the natural world, and this means, also, the world of biological species (Cela & Ayala 2014). Secondly, I believe that Cartwright recognizes the twofold and ambivalent role of science in society. On the one hand, science is an enterprise of problem-solving that goes through the detour of generalization, abstraction and mathematization. This detour provides technical results that are applicable in the large scale or, for the matter, that are technically operative and that, in so being, promote an (economically) efficient treatment of those practical issues that were accurately generalized and modelled. On the other hand, however, science is also an enterprise that aims at finding some intelligibility to the events that surround us and, more generally, to the universe. This philosophical aspect of science is then capable to nourish self-interpretive activities in the wider society. Occasionally – and I must stress this adverb here- scientifically inspired interpretations may lead to ideological or victimizing discourses. However, it is just as difficult to strip science of its 3

This was also, more or less, the conceptualist midway solution to the medieval debate about concepts between the realists and the nominalists. Thus, our concepts and theories tell us something about the real order in nature, and our tacit skills and stereotypes would complement our theories in order to assemble a unitary world. This unity would not be logical but it could be said to be analogical, and dependent, amongst other things, on the relevant tacit, or implicit skills.

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ideological interpretations as it is to stop people from seeking scientific or, more generally, epistemic justifications to their moral and political beliefs. Both aspects of science, the instrumental and the philosophical, have been distinguished and wonderfully discussed by Peter Dear (Dear 2006). In Dear’s twofold picture of science, we find that the instrumental part is referred to as a set of reliable activities that is more or less guided or adequately commented by theory, and whose result is that very theory, but not only. As to the philosophical part, it responds to a genuine aspiration to provide intelligibility to interpretations. This, science does through the methodical elaboration and sanction of acceptable, empirically adequate and explanatory powerful discourses. Of course, these explanations apply to models whose validity is local and relative to changing circumstances. However, it is also relative to a conceptual and logical framework whereby the meanings of abstract concepts relate to one another. Nobody said that this framework had to be unitary, but, as Kant reminds us, the demand for one such unity is just as legitimate as the attention to the multiplicity of experience. On the other hand, we see how people do in fact demand such unity and meaningfulness from their explanatory resources4. Thus, if a picture of the world is something that we cannot deny to people, then we better look for a way that such unity is comprised of our best available knowledge and our most refined and critical methods of enquiry, which are, of course, those of the sciences. If empiricist philosophers of science do not fancy providing such opportunity for self-interpretation, then rationalist philosophers of science will surely be happy to join scientists in the task. To conclude, Cartwright’s descriptive thesis of epistemological pluralism is acceptable with reservations, but her normative thesis is more problematic. Personally, I have no interest in advancing science at the expense of its fragmentation into specialized compartments, as Kuhn would deem it inevitable (Kuhn 1962). Rather, I am interested in the possibility and desirability for scientists and philosophers to produce and communicate intelligible and meaningful explanations within coherent wholes. Such wholes would include the strategies of explanation and justification shared by scientists, their background assumptions and the way those principles correlate with one another in order to give rise to meaningful pictures of the world that guide self-interpretation and allow people to understand themselves without thereby renouncing to use the best knowledge available. By being provided with such critical tools for enquiry, at least people would be given the chance to escape the threat of becoming the necessary victims of outdated conceptions of reality with a doubtful epistemic value, if not utterly superstitious. If one believes in a principle of enlightenment as a vehicle for social and civilizing improvement, then one 4

In my (Cañizares 2015b) I have tried to amalgamate some basic epistemological resources of the historian more inclined to the social sciences. I regard this task of providing unitary conceptions of nature and human knowledge, as an absolutely essential one for contemporary philosophers. My work is very preliminary and imperfect, but shows some promise as to how some such program should proceed.

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must commit to a normative thesis of methodological epistemic monism. This demand would be aligned with an ideal of methodological humanism, not one necessarily committed to recognizing an existing common human nature, but able to stress and defend the convenience and necessity to "produce" some such nature, as paradoxical as this statement may sound.

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- [2015b, unpubl.]. Objectivity in Global History. The Case of Scientific and Technological Development. Enschede: University of Twente. https://www.academia.edu/21063754/Objectivity_in_Global_History._The_case_of_scientific _and_technological_development  Cartwright, N. (1999). The Dappled World. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Books Online. Web. 27 January 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167093  Cassirer, E. (1923). Substance and Function, and Einstein Theory of Relativity. Chicago, London: The Open Court Publishing Company.  Cela, C. J., & Ayala, F. J. (2014). Evolución humana: el camino hacia nuestra especie. Madrid: Alianza.  Dear, P. (2006). The Intelligibility of Nature. How Science Makes Sense of the World. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.  Descartes, R., (1993). Meditaciones metafísicas con objeciones y respuestas, Traducido por Peña García, Vidal. Madrid: Alfaguara. -- [1954]. “Rules for the Direction of the Mind”, in Philosophical Writings (A Selection). Translated by M.E. Anscombe and P.Geach. London: Nelson.  Feyerabend, Paul. (1975). “How to Defend Society against Science”. Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science - 3rd Edition. Klemke, Hollinger, et.al. (Eds.) 1998: 54-65.  Feyerabend, P. (2010). Against Method. 4th ed., New York, NY: Verso Books.  Kuhn, Thomas, 1962, La Estructura de las Revoluciones Científicas, Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica de España, 2006.

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