Scientific realism and the inevitability of science
Section snippets
Inevitabilism
In The social construction of what?, Ian Hacking describes a position which he refers to as inevitabilism. According to Hacking, inevitabilists
The inevitabilist position is opposed to a position which emphasizes the contingency of science:do not think that the progress of physics was inevitable (we could have stayed with Zen). They do think that if successful physics took place, then it would have inevitably happened in something like our way. (Hacking, 1999, p. 79)
there could have been a
Necessity and fallibilism
Talk of contingency and inevitability raises questions about necessity and certainty in science. To clarify what is at issue in relation to the inevitability of science, I will offer some preliminary clarification of these matters before turning to the question of scientific realism and the inevitability of science.
Scientific realism
Before turning to the question of the realist view of the inevitability of science, I will briefly sketch the position of scientific realism. This sketch of scientific realism is based on a characterization of the position that I have formulated elsewhere (Sankey, 2001).
It is characteristic of scientific realism that the aim of science is taken to be truth. This has the consequence that progress in science is understood as progress toward the truth. Hence, the first principle I propose of
Realism and inevitabilism
No explicit statement about the inevitability of science occurs among the principles of scientific realism that have just been presented. So, in a strict sense, scientific realism says nothing about the issue. But the question remains of whether the principles of realism may have implications with respect to the inevitability of science. I will now consider a number of connections which might be drawn between various principles of realism and the issue of the inevitability of science.
To begin
The ocean floor
I will now consider a case study which illustrates the role played by contingency in the formation of the empirical basis of science. I will then suggest the appropriate scientific realist attitude toward such contingency.
While continental drift is now a widely accepted phenomenon, this was not always the case. The idea that the continents move across the surface of the Earth was proposed by Alfred Wegener early in the twentieth century. But, until the 1960s, most earth scientists continued to
Realism, reliabilism and inevitability
So far in this paper, I have sought to show that there is no clear connection between scientific realism and the question of inevitability. In the preceding section, I presented an example in which historical contingency plays a role in determining the empirical basis of science. In this section, I will explore an extension of scientific realism which leads to consequences that are inevitabilist in character. But I must stress that the form of inevitabilism at issue in this section is not the
Conclusion
Before concluding, it is important briefly to mention one final variation on the theme of contingency and inevitability in science. As I understand the claim of the inevitabilist, it is a claim about the inevitability that science will converge on a single true theory of the world that is in large part similar to current science. This, I have said, is a thesis about the nature of our epistemic practices, rather than a thesis about the nature of the world as such. Nor, I should add, is it a
Acknowledgements
Work on this paper was in part undertaken while I was a visitor at the Poincaré Archives, Laboratory of the Philosophy and History of Science, University of Nancy 2 (France), supported by an Arts Faculty Special Studies Program travel grant from the University of Melbourne. Talks based on earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Poincaré Archives, as well as the Steno Institute, University of Aarhus (Denmark), and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of
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Cited by (10)
Inevitability, contingency, and epistemic humility
2016, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part ACitation Excerpt :Four points ought to be noted. First, contingency might creep into the inevitabilist position even at this initial stage, since the concepts and standards that define the resources and methods appropriate to scientific enquiry are subject to historical contingencies, a fact noted by Howard Sankey (2008) and David E. Cooper (2002: pp.199–200), among others. Many contemporary historians and sociologists of science have documented the variety of contingent social and cultural factors that shaped early debates about the epistemology and methodology of scientific enquiry, including postlapsarian theologies and shifting conceptions of the requisite moral and intellectual qualities of the natural philosopher.3
State of the field: Are the results of science contingent or inevitable?
2015, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part ACitation Excerpt :“Contingentism” and “inevitabilism” made their first appearance as explicit philosophical positions in Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What (1999, 68–80), with further explication following a year later in a paper that asked: “How Inevitable are the Results of Successful Science?” (2000). The issue has since been explored in more detail in a symposium organized by Léna Soler, published in History and Philosophy of Science (Franklin, 2008; Sankey, 2008; Soler, 2008a, 2008b; Trizio, 2008), in a focus section of Isis dedicated to the role of counterfactuals in the history of science (Bowler, 2008; French, 2008; Fuller, 2008; Henry, 2008; Radick, 2008) and at a conference titled Science as it Could Have Been, held in 2009.2 We can find some further explicit references to the contingency issue (Kidd, 2013, in press; Martin, 2013; Radick, 2003, 2005) but in general, systematic and conceptually rigorous literature on the problem is rare.
History of Rationalities: Ways of Thinking from Vico to Hacking and Beyond
2023, History of Rationalities: Ways of Thinking from Vico to Hacking and BeyondCould science be interestingly different?
2018, Journal of the Philosophy of HistoryScientific realism and social epistemology
2017, The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism