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Truth might be better understood as ‘practical adequacy’, that is in terms of the extent to which it generates expectations about the world and about results of our actions which are realised. Just how practically adequate different parts of our knowledge are will vary according to where and to what they are applied. The differences in success of the same beliefs in different contexts and different beliefs in the same context suggest that the world is structured and differentiated, and has some degree of stability, so that while some things are transient, some are not.
While on the one hand I find this account given by Andrew Sayer plausible, on the other it seems much less so, all the more given that the fact that it’s offered in conscious opposition to Rorty’s pragmatism i.e. what is true is what works. As Rorty once said of science “Modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope”. Obviously there’s a trivial sense in which this is obviously false: unless we accept that modern science somehow captures something that, say, Voodoo does not then the manipulative capacity it grants us becomes nonsensical. Modern science allows us to cope - an unfortunate term given that it conflates the practical-instrumental and moral-existential dimensions of our engagement with the world – in the way Rorty admits it does because while it many not ‘correspond’ (with all the centuries of philosophical baggage that term brings with it) to the world, it certainly offers us the conceptual tools and structures our engagements with the world in a way that’s possessed of a far greater degree of practical adequacy than the alternatives available to us.
Once we dispense with the representationalist metaphores that Rorty is objecting to – i.e. that the world out there corresponds to the representation of it in my mind - the difference between what Rorty’s account of truth and that which Sayer gives seems rather semantic. Perhaps it’s far more a consequence of Rorty’s intellectual pseudo-radicalism and inability to break from the confines of the analytic tradition – the sort of thing which leads him into the quagmire of claiming that there’s no privileged relation between discourse and the world - than it is of some fundamental anti-realism that’s genuinely felt? One can’t help but feel that if Rorty had simply started life in a literature department, he never would have meandered into the intellectual cul-de-sac that he did. Or indeed if he’d trained in a Sociology department, he might well have endorsed the account of truth as practical adequacy that Sayer’s proposing.
I just came across this great article from Science News. It’s a report from a conference on critical realism and theology.
According to McMullin and to Peacocke, critical realism stands opposed to those who regard scientific development as conditioned by sociology. Specifically they mention the “Edinburgh school” of sociologists of science and the followers of philosopher and physicist Thomas Kuhn of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the Kuhnian view, scientific activity is governed by paradigms, generally accepted ways of looking at a given problem or set of problems. What people seek to find experimentally, what they do find and how they relate new findings to old knowledge are all highly conditioned by the particular paradigm they follow. The Ptolemaic picture of the solar system, to which the Inquisition was wedded, and Galileo’s Copernican view are rival paradigms in the Kuhnian view. Observers believing in either one would arrange observations according to the presuppositions of that paradigm.
Critical realists will have none of this conditioning. They insist that, by correcting errors and rejecting false starts, science “converges” to real answers to given questions, answers that are not paradigmatically conditioned.
Peacocke sees the sciences as a “nested set,” each dealing with reality at a particular level of complexity. In his view, the levels of greater complexity are not completely reducible to levels of lower complexity: Biology, for example, is not reducible to physics and chemistry. Peacocke does not believe in anything like an elan vital, some special principle of life. He acknowledges that the processes occurring in biology are those of physics and chemistry but insists nevertheless that biology is not reducible to chemistry and physics. In this nonreductionist scheme, theology takes its place as dealing with reality on the most complex level of all, and it is not reducible to the natural sciences. One of the serious problems in the past has been that science has explained on natural grounds things that theologians considered inexplicable.
Physics makes scientific problems for critical realism. Antirealists, McMullin remarked, will draw their examples from mechanics. At the time I was unwilling to be called an antirealist — who wants to be in favor of unreality? — but now I think I probably am one, from the critical realists’ point of view. I asked whether science needs to converge to one answer to every question. Quantum mechanics tends to give at least two answers to every question, and it tells you you can’t choose between them; it deals with a reality that is complex and often paradoxical. McMullin brushed this aside. To him there are no paradoxes in quantum mechanics — a conclusion, I think, that will amaze most physicists. To most physicists the conjunction of particle and wave natures in a single being is as close to an antithesis as you are likely to get.
Peacocke insists that critical realism teaches us that electrons are real. I believe it; now tell me what an electron is. What does “real” mean in the context of an electron’s existence? Indeed, for physicists the interesting question nowadays is whether quarks and gluons are real, but critical realism’s exclusion of mechanics from its purview seems to preclude it from dealing with that question.
The critical realists concentrate on what they call the structural sciences, by which they mostly mean biology. They get geology into their program by leaving dynamics out of it. They also try to annex astrophysics by leaving mechanics out of it. Most astrophysicists would be hard put to find much left of their discipline if you took mechanics out of it. I got the feeling that I was attending a celebration by biologists who had found a philosophy that fits biology rather well, as the Kuhnian analysis fits physics rather well, and who were not going to let objections mar their festivities, even when the objections came from another biologist.
I think what they’re saying is ultimately wrong but it’s a fascinating engagement. I guess from the Critical Realist standpoint the dispute could in part be explained by the restrictive metatheoretical architecture of disciplinary practices that have, to varying degrees, occluded epistemic relativism through all manner of basically quite dogmatic positivist metatheory. In itself I’d suggest this is more understandable given the entire debate played itself out within a framework that metaphysically counterposed scientific objectivity to human subjectivity, such that a collapse of the seperation between them was seen to threaten the very possibility of truth and reason. Yet this fear is mistaken. As the glossary for critical realism explains,
Epistemic relativism turns on the issue whether science has a universal, objective and unchanging set of concepts that serve as its absolute foundation (SRHE 43). Its opposite is termed “monism.” Bhaskar says it does not and hence plumps for epistemic relativism. He believes that all our concepts and beliefs are historically generated and conditioned and so relative to a perspective and subject to change. He combines this view with judgmental rationality, which asserts that science is not arbitrary and that there are rational criteria for judging some theories as better and more explanatory than others.
Epistemic relativism, of course, does not say that our conceptual toolkit is arbitrary, a view no doubt supported by judgmental rationality. This concept also permits an understanding of changing conceptual framework as well as the accretion of knowledge in an unchanged conceptual framework (SRHE 52). Bhaskar often refers to changing and unchanging knowledge, but he appears to mean conceptual frameworks rather than the aggregate of what is known.
Interesting links I want to read later, knowing that if I stick them in my browser bookmarks I’ll never look at them again.
Myths of individualism by generic Cato wankers.
Critical realism glossary by the Website for Critical Realism.
Bhaskar’s Plato Etc being reviewed by the New Scientist.
