(Changed the thread title since we’ve drifted far from natural propositions)
> On Sep 30, 2014, at 11:58 AM, Benjamin Udell <bud...@nyc.rr.com > <mailto:bud...@nyc.rr.com>> wrote: > > > [CG] Whether the “nearly real” is good enough is a reasonable question. > > Like you, I see it as good enough, but I think there are important caveats > > one has to make which is why I mentioned that on practical grounds for many > > entities they act like instrumentalists. > [End quote] > > I'd say that they're acting as fallibilists. They may also hold that a theory > should be evaluated not for the plausibility of its assumptions but the only > for the success of its predictions, and it's more tempting to call that > approach instrumentalism. Some have even held that it's okay and even > necessary for the assumptions to be 'descriptively false'. > While related to fallibilism I’m not sure that’s a good term. Fallibilists in practice just reject epistemic foundationalism. Since there are very few foundationalists left I’m not sure that gets us much. (I only see them among theological oriented philosophers doing epistemology - but perhaps there are a few atheist foundationalists left) Now certainly most scientists - especially since positivism largely died - are fallibiliist. I think what I’m talking about goes beyond that. I think many (wish there was a poll for this) physicists view laws like the ideal gas law or even Newton’s Laws as useful fictions. But they may well be a realist towards other phenomena laws or structures. That whole “useful fiction” bit really goes well beyond fallibilism. I vaguely remember Peirce discussing something like this. I’ll try and look it up tonight. It was relative to measurement and simplifications one makes in physics and chemistry. Really that’s the issue at hand. When is a first or second order approximation good enough? (e.g. analogy to series expansion with Fourier, Bessel, or Spherical Bessel functions) > Now, that could mean merely seemingly false by omission of factors that one > would have thought to be pertinent, and I do think that is part of it. Yes, the first and second order approximation gets at that. But it can also apply to simplified boundary conditions or, as with Newton’s Laws, discovering laws one thought were universal were actually just an approximation in certain conditions. i.e. not fundamental. > Still, I'd call that fallibilism, not instrumentalism, although it reflects > the spirit of some who call themselves instrumentalists. I think the difference, even beyond the useful fiction, is over what generals one can legitimately precind and what are more “accidental” simplifications. To go back to the series expansion analogy often if you find a large term in the first or second term and the following terms are very small, you feel legitimate to say this is a real structure. However for some simplifications you don’t think the resultant structures are really there but that you are just making a model that gives you useful answers. For even a scholastic realist of the Perigean sort I think we can make a distinction there between useful fictions and mind independent structures that may be obscured due to complexity. So to return to my other example, one might see the ideal gas law as a real law that gets obscured by other complexities or one might see it purely as a simple model that does not get at an underlying structure. Discerning what’s a simplification and what’s a real structure is often not at all clear. It’s also what makes discerning structures in complex phenomena such as economics or psychology so hard compared to physics. With physics we can tease out underlying phenomena from complicating factors like friction. > But even Peirce's idea of plausibility is more about developing a theory than > about evaluating its success. Most scientific hypotheses, including quite a > few highly plausible ones, get disconfirmed, and I don't think that Peirce > held that hypotheses that stand up to testing generally turn out to have been > the most plausible in advance. Verification and falsification take place over time and are a continuing process rather than something “completed.” As you say, lots of things that seem solid (like Newton’s laws prior to 1910) are turned over. Plausibility seems always indexed to a particular time, set of theories, and experimental results. > The case of the incomplex hypothesis which one really doesn't expect to be > true is the closest, I think, to instrumentalism, but it's a case of treating > a hypothesis instrumentally without embracing the view called > 'instrumentalism', which holds (or originally held, according to what we find > in Peirce's account of it) that theories don't affirm objective laws or norms > but merely predict particular results. When I think of instrumentalism I tend to think of Feynman rather than the more formal philosophers of science. His focus was on calculating rather than reality. He was a big proponent of that and famously warned people off from trying to understand quantum mechanics at a deep level. I don’t know how influential that perspective still is. That poll that Howard linked to unfortunately didn’t directly touch on the instrumentalist question beyond perhaps the question about whether QM was epistemic (27%). I’m not sure that gets at the issue sufficiently though. It also doesn’t get at what we might term “situational instrumentalism” for lack of a better term. I suspect that’s much more common. But then you have to ask what theories one is situational about. > Still, insofar as fallibilism applies to our beliefs, and incomplex > hypotheses aside for the moment, how does one characterize other than as > 'instrumental' one's attitude _toward_ the tentative or experimental > hypothesis or theory that conflicts with a belief that one holds? I would > call it 'successiblism', the attitude that said hypothesis or theory is > 'successible', i.e., it could be true, and that one could find the real > through it. Even the incomplex hypothesis has to be granted some provisional > credibility, as a kind of possible approximation to the truth. Of course one > needs both fallibilism and successibilism about one's beliefs and one's > doubts, hypotheses, etc.; but sometimes one or the other stands out more as > what one needs. With the terms 'fallibilism' and 'successibilism' obvously > I'm trying for the kind of informative etymological counterbalancing involved > in 'verifiable' and 'falsifiable' but with a much smaller morphological mess. As I said I don’t think fallibilism gets at this issue. I wonder if degree of belief might be a fruitful Peircean notion to apply. It gets at the issue that how we act is dependent upon how much we believe the structure in question. I say that because I think there are plenty of people who might see some social or ethical norms as “useful fictions” without believing them. (Say Voltaire’s take on Christianity) And of course the notion of the double truth has a long if sometimes misrepresented history. Think the Averroists for instance. Some might say Strauss advocates that too. But this is not all which distinguishes doubt from belief. There is a practical difference. Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions. The Assassins, or followers of the Old Man of the Mountain, used to rush into death at his least command, because they believed that obedience to him would insure everlasting felicity. Had they doubted this, they would not have acted as they did. So it is with every belief, according to its degree. The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions. Doubt never has such an effect. (“The Fixation of Belief” EP 1:114) I’m not sure we need much more than this. The people with situational instrumentalism will simply act differently than those with true instrumentalism and those who have a “near realism” or “good enough realism” towards certain structures will act differently still. Now the danger is that we move more towards William James’ view of acting on belief rather than Peirce’s. But I think even sticking to Peirce we can see differences in terms of how people calculate or measure or verify.
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