Pierre Duhem’s epistemic aims and the intellectual virtue of humility: a reply to Ivanova

David Stump (2007) has recently argued that Pierre Duhem can be interpreted as a virtue epistemologist. Stump’s claims have been challenged by Milena Ivanova (2010) on the grounds that Duhem’s ‘epistemic aims’ are more modest than those of virtue epistemologists. I challenge Ivanova’s criticism of Stump by arguing that she not distinguish between ‘reliabilist’ and ‘responsibilist’ virtue epistemologies. Once this distinction is drawn, Duhem clearly emerges as a ‘virtue-responsibilist’ in a way that complements Ivanova’s positive proposal that Duhem’s ‘good sense’ reflects a conception of the ‘ideal scientist’. I support my proposal that Duhem is a ‘virtue-responsibilist’ by arguing that his rejection of the possibility of our producing a ‘perfect theory’ reflects the key responsibilist virtue of ‘intellectual humility’.     

Pierre Duhem’s virtue epistemology

Duhem’s concept of ‘good sense’ is central to his philosophy of science, given that it is what allows scientists to decide between competing theories. Scientists must use good sense and have intellectual and moral virtues in order to be neutral arbiters of scientific theories, especially when choosing between empirically adequate theories. I discuss the parallels in Duhem’s views to those of virtue epistemologists, who understand justified belief as that arrived at by a cognitive agent with intellectual and moral virtues, showing how consideration of Duhem as a virtue epistemologist offers insights into his views, as well as providing possible answers to some puzzles about virtue epistemology. The extent to which Duhem holds that the intellectual and moral virtues of the scientist determine scientific knowledge has not been generally noticed.     

Pierre Duhem’s good sense as a guide to theory choice

This paper examines Duhem’s concept of good sense as an attempt to support a non rule-governed account of rationality in theory choice. Faced with the underdetermination of theory by evidence thesis and the continuity thesis, Duhem tried to account for the ability of scientists to choose theories that continuously grow to a natural classification. I will examine the concept of good sense and the problems that stem from it. I will also present a recent attempt by David Stump to link good sense to virtue epistemology. I will argue that even though this approach can be useful for the better comprehension of the concept of good sense, there are some substantial differences between virtue epistemologists and Duhem. In the light of this reconstruction of good sense, I will propose a possible way to interpret the concept of good sense, which overcomes the noted problems and fits better with Duhem’s views on scientific method and motivation in developing the concept of good sense.     

Kuhn and coherentist epistemology

The paper challenges a recent attempt by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen to show that since Thomas Kuhn’s philosophical standpoint can be incorporated into coherentist epistemology, it does not necessarily lead to: (Thesis 1) an abandonment of rationality and rational interparadigm theory comparison, nor to (Thesis 2) an abandonment of convergent realism. Leaving aside the interpretation of Kuhn as a coherentist, we will show that Kuukkanen’s first thesis is not sufficiently explicated, while the second one entirely fails. With regard to Thesis 1, we argue that Kuhn’s view on inter-paradigm theory comparison allows only for (what we shall dub as) ‘the weak notion of rationality’, and that Kuukkanen’s argument is thus acceptable only in view of such a notion. With regard to Thesis 2, we show that even if we interpret Kuhn as a coherentist, his philosophical standpoint cannot be seen as compatible with convergent realism since Kuhn’s argument against it is not ‘ultimately empirical’, as Kuukkanen takes it to be.     

On Popper’s strong inductivism (or strongly inconsistent anti-inductivism)

It is generally accepted that Popper‘s degree of corroboration, though “inductivist” in a very general and weak sense, is not inductivist in a strong sense, i.e. when by ‘inductivism’ we mean the thesis that the right measure of evidential support has a probabilistic character. The aim of this paper is to challenge this common view by arguing that Popper can be regarded as an inductivist, not only in the weak broad sense but also in a narrower, probabilistic sense. In section 2, first, I begin by briefly characterizing the relevant notion of inductivism that is at stake here; second, I present and discuss the main Popperian argument against it and show that in the only reading in which the argument is formally it is restricted to cases of predicted evidence, and that even if restricted in this way the argument is formally valid it is nevertheless materially unsound. In section 3, I analyze the desiderata that, according to Popper, any acceptable measure for evidential support must satisfy, I clean away its ad-hoc components and show that all the remaining desiderata are satisfied by inductuvist-in-strict-sense measures. In section 4 I demonstrate that two of these desiderata, accepted by Popper, imply that in cases of predicted evidence any measure that satisfies them is qualitatively indistinguishable from conditional probability. Finally I defend that this amounts to a kind of strong inductivism that enters into conflict with Popper’s anti-inductivist argument and declarations, and that this conflict does not depend on the incremental versus non-incremental distinction for evidential-support measures, making Popper’s position inconsistent in any reading.     

‘The long-lost truth’: Sir Isaac Newton and the Newtonian pursuit of ancient knowledge

In the 1720s the antiquary and Newtonian scholar Dr. William Stukeley (1687-1765) described his friend Isaac Newton as ‘the Great Restorer of True Philosophy’. Newton himself in his posthumously published Observations upon the prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733) predicted that the imminent fulfilment of Scripture prophecy would see ‘a recovery and re-establishment of the long-lost truth’. In this paper I examine the background to Newton’s interest in ancient philosophy and theology, and how it related to modern natural philosophical discovery. I look at the way in which the idea of a ‘long-lost truth’ interested others within Newton’s immediate circle, and in particular how it was carried forward by Stukeley’s researches into ancient British antiquities. I show how an interest in and respect for ancient philosophical knowledge remained strong within the first half of the eighteenth century.     

How not to integrate the history and philosophy of science: a reply to Chalmers

Alan Chalmers uses Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy as an example of the irrelevance of ‘philosophy’ to ‘science’ and criticizes my 2006 book Atoms and alchemy for overemphasizing Boyle’s successes. The present paper responds as follows: first, it argues that Chalmers employs an overly simplistic methodology insensitive to the distinction between historical and philosophical claims; second, it shows that the central theses of Atoms and alchemy are untouched by Chalmers’s criticisms; and third, it uses Boyle’s analysis of subordinate causes and his debate with Henry More in the 1670s to demonstrate the inadequacy of Chalmers’s construal of the mechanical philosophy.     

Abstract considerations: disciplines and the incoherence of Newton’s natural philosophy

Historians have long sought putative connections between different areas of Newton’s scientific work, while recently scholars have argued that there were causal links between even more disparate fields of his intellectual activity. In this paper I take an opposite approach, and attempt to account for certain tensions in Newton’s ‘scientific’ work by examining his great sensitivity to the disciplinary divisions that both conditioned and facilitated his early investigations in science and mathematics. These momentous undertakings, exemplified by research that he wrote up in two separate notebooks, obey strict distinctions between approaches appropriate to both new and old ‘natural philosophy’ and those appropriate to the mixed mathematical sciences. He retained a fairly rigid demarcation between them until the early eighteenth century. At the same time as Newton presented the ‘mathematical principles’ of natural philosophy in his magnum opus of 1687, he remained equally committed to a separate and more private world or ontology that he publicly denigrated as hypothetical or conjectural. This is to say nothing of the worlds implicit in his work on mathematics and alchemy. He did not lurch from one overarching ontological commitment to the next (for example, moving tout court from radical aetherial explanations to strictly vacuist accounts) but instead simultaneously—and often radically—developed generically distinct concepts and ontologies that were appropriate to specific settings and locations (for example, private, qualitative, causal natural philosophy versus public quantitative mixed mathematics) as well as to relevant styles of argument. Accordingly I argue that the concepts used by Newton throughout his career were intimately bound up with these appropriate generic or quasi-disciplinary ‘structures’. His later efforts to bring together active principles, aethers and voids in various works were not failures that resulted from his ‘confusion’ but were bold attempts to meld together concepts or ontologies that belonged to distinct enquiries. His analysis could not be ‘coherent’ because the structures in which they appeared were fundamentally incompatible.     

Newton on action at a distance and the cause of gravity

In this discussion paper, I seek to challenge Hylarie Kochiras’ recent claims on Newton’s attitude towards action at a distance, which will be presented in Section 1. In doing so, I shall include the positions of Andrew Janiak and John Henry in my discussion and present my own tackle on the matter (Section 2). Additionally, I seek to strengthen Kochiras’ argument that Newton sought to explain the cause of gravity in terms of secondary causation (Section 3). I also provide some specification on what Kochiras calls ‘Newton’s substance counting problem’ (Section 4). In conclusion, I suggest a historical correction (Section 5).     

Hacking’s historical epistemology: a critique of styles of reasoning

The paper begins with a detailed reconstruction of the development of Ian Hacking’s theory of scientific ‘styles of reasoning’, paying particular attention to Alistair Crombie’s influence, and suggesting that Hacking’s theory deserves to come under the title ‘historical epistemology’. Subsequently, the paper seeks to establish three critical theses. First, Hacking’s reliance on Crombie leads him to adopt an outdated historiographical position; second, Hacking is unsuccessful in his attempt to distance historical epistemology from epistemic relativism; and third, Hacking has not (yet) offered convincing criteria for individuating styles of reasoning.     

Conventionalism in Reid’s ‘geometry of visibles’

The subject of this investigation is the role of conventions in the formulation of Thomas Reid’s theory of the geometry of vision, which he calls the ‘geometry of visibles’. In particular, we will examine the work of N. Daniels and R. Angell who have alleged that, respectively, Reid’s ‘geometry of visibles’ and the geometry of the visual field are non-Euclidean. As will be demonstrated, however, the construction of any geometry of vision is subject to a choice of conventions regarding the construction and assignment of its various properties, especially metric properties, and this fact undermines the claim for a unique non-Euclidean status for the geometry of vision. Finally, a suggestion is offered for trying to reconcile Reid’s direct realist theory of perception with his geometry of visibles.While Thomas Reid is well-known as the leading exponent of the Scottish ‘common-sense’ school of philosophy, his role in the history of geometry has only recently been drawing the attention of the scholarly community. In particular, several influential works, by N. Daniels and R. B. Angell, have claimed Reid as the discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry; an achievement, moreover, that pre-dates the geometries of Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Gauss by over a half century. Reid’s alleged discovery appears within the context of his analysis of the geometry of the visual field, which he dubs the ‘geometry of visibles’. In summarizing the importance of Reid’s philosophy in this area, Daniels is led to conclude that ‘there can remain little doubt that Reid intends the geometry of visibles to be an alternative to Euclidean geometry’;¹ while Angell, similarly inspired by Reid, draws a much stronger inference: ‘The geometry which precisely and naturally fits the actual configurations of the visual field is a non-Euclidean, two-dimensional, elliptical geometry. In substance, this thesis was advanced by Thomas Reid in 1764 ...’² The significance of these findings has not gone unnoticed in mathematical and scientific circles, moreover, for Reid’s name is beginning to appear more frequently in historical surveys of the development of geometry and the theories of space.³Implicit in the recent work on Reid’s ‘geometry of visibles’, or GOV, one can discern two closely related but distinct arguments: first, that Reid did in fact formulate a non-Euclidean geometry, and second, that the GOV is non-Euclidean. This essay will investigate mainly the latter claim, although a lengthy discussion will be accorded to the first. Overall, in contrast to the optimistic reports of a non-Euclidean GOV, it will be argued that there is a great deal of conceptual freedom in the construction of any geometry pertaining to the visual field. Rather than single out a non-Euclidean structure as the only geometry consistent with visual phenomena, an examination of Reid, Daniels, and Angell will reveal the crucial role of geometric ‘conventions’, especially of the metric sort, in the formulation of the GOV (where a ‘metric’ can be simply defined as a system for determining distances, the measures of angles, etc.). Consequently, while a non-Euclidean geometry is consistent with Reid’s GOV, it is only one of many different geometrical structures that a GOV can possess. Angell’s theory that the GOV can only be construed as non-Euclidean, is thus incorrect. After an exploration of Reid’s theory and the alleged non-Euclidean nature of the GOV, in 1 and 2 respectively, the focus will turn to the tacit role of conventionalism in Daniels’ reconstruction of Reid’s GOV argument, and in the contemporary treatment of a non-Euclidean visual geometry offered by Angell ( 3 and 4). Finally, in the conclusion, a suggestion will be offered for a possible reconstruction of Reid’s GOV that does not violate his avowed ‘direct realist’ theory of perception, since this epistemological thesis largely prompted his formulation of the GOV.     

The electrons of the dinosaurs and the center of the Earth: comments on D.D. Turner’s ‘The past vs. the tiny: historical science and the abductive arguments for realism’

Turner [The past vs. the tiny: Historical science and the abductive arguments for realism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35A (2004) 1] claims that the arguments in favor of realism do not support with the same force both classes of realism, since they supply stronger reasons for experimental realism than for historical realism. I would like to make two comments, which should be seen as amplifications inspired by his proposal, rather than as a criticism. First, it is important to highlight that Turner’s distinction between ‘tiny’ and ‘past unobservables’ is neither excluding nor exhaustive. Second, even if we agreed with everything that Turner says regarding the arguments for realism and their relative weight in order to justify the experimental or historical version, there is an aspect that Turner does not consider and that renders historical realism less problematic than experimental realism.     

Athanasius Kircher’s magical instruments: an essay on ‘science’, ‘religion’ and applied metaphysics

In this paper I endeavour to bridge the gap between the history of material culture and the history of ideas. I do this by focussing on the intersection between metaphysics and technology—what I call ‘applied metaphysics’—in the oeuvre of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. By scrutinising the interplay between texts, objects and images in Kircher’s work, it becomes possible to describe the multiplicity of meanings related to his artefacts. I unearth as yet overlooked metaphysical and religious meanings of the camera obscura, for instance, as well as of various other optical and magnetic devices. Today, instruments and artefacts are almost exclusively seen in the light of a narrow economic and technical concept. Historically, the ‘use’ of artefacts is much more diverse, however, and I argue that it is time to historicize the concept of ‘utility’.     

Kant’s third law of mechanics: The long shadow of Leibniz

This paper examines the origin, range and meaning of the Principle of Action and Reaction in Kant’s mechanics. On the received view, it is a version of Newton’s Third Law. I argue that Kant meant his principle as foundation for a Leibnizian mechanics. To find a ‘Newtonian’ law of action and reaction, we must look to Kant’s ‘dynamics,’ or theory of matter.     

Stance relativism: empiricism versus metaphysics: The Empirical Stance Bas C. Van Fraassen; Yale University Press, London & New Haven, 2002, pp. xix+282, Price £22.50 hardback, ISBN 0300088744.

In The empirical stance, Bas van Fraassen argues for a reconceptualization of empiricism, and a rejection of its traditional rival, speculative metaphysics, as part of a larger and provocative study in epistemology. Central to his account is the notion of voluntarism in epistemology, and a concomitant understanding of the nature of rationality. In this paper I give a critical assessment of these ideas, with the ultimate goal of clarifying the nature of debate between metaphysicians and empiricists, and more specifically, between scientific realists and empiricist antirealists. Despite van Fraassen’s assertion to the contrary, voluntarism leads to a form of epistemic relativism. Rather than stifling debate, however, this ‘stance’ relativism places precise constraints on possibilities for constructive engagement between metaphysicians and empiricists, and thus distinguishes, in broad terms, paths along which this debate may usefully proceed from routes which offer no hope of progress.     

Gravity and Newton’s Substance Counting Problem

A striking feature of Newton’s thought is the very broad reach of his empiricism, potentially extending even to immaterial substances, including God, minds, and should one exist, a non-perceiving immaterial medium. Yet Newton is also drawn to certain metaphysical principles—most notably the principle that matter cannot act where it is not—and this second, rationalist feature of his thought is most pronounced in his struggle to discover ‘gravity’s cause’. The causal problem remains vexing, for he neither invokes primary causation, nor accepts action at a distance by locating active powers in matter. To the extent that he is drawn to metaphysical principles, then, the causal problem is that of discovering some non-perceiving immaterial medium. Yet Newton’s thought has a third striking feature, one with roots in the other two: he allows that substances of different kinds might simultaneously occupy the very same region of space. I elicit the implications of these three features. For Newton to insist upon all three would transform the causal question about gravity into an insoluble problem about apportioning active powers. More seriously, it would undermine his means of individuating substances, provoking what I call ‘Newton’s Substance Counting Problem’.     

Three concepts of causation in Newton

In this paper, I argue that recent debates about Newton’s attitude toward action at a distance have been hampered by a lack of conceptual clarity. To clarify the metaphysical background of the debates, I distinguish three kinds of causes within Newton’s work: mechanical, dynamical, and substantial causes. This threefold distinction enables us to recognize that although Newton clearly regards gravity as an impressed force that operates across vast distances, he denies that this commitment requires him to think that some substance acts at a distance on another substance. (Dynamical causation is distinct from substantial causation.) Newton’s denial of substantial action at a distance may strike his interpreters as questionable, so I provide an argument to show that it is in fact acceptable.     

Philosophy and history of science: Beyond the Kuhnian paradigm

At issue in this paper is the question of the appropriate relationship between the philosophy and history of science. The discussion starts with a brief sketch of Kuhn's approach, followed by an analysis of the so-called ‘testing-theories-of-scientific-change programme’. This programme is an attempt at a more rigorous approach to the historical philosophy of science. Since my conclusion is that, by and large, this attempt has failed, I proceed to examine some more promising approaches. First, I deal with Hacking's recent views on the issues in question, particularly his notion of a ‘style of reasoning’. Next, Nickles's reconstructionist interpretation of the development of science and his views on Whig history are addressed. Finally, I propose an account of philosophy as a theoretical, an interpretative and explanatory, enterprise. Thus, three alternatives to the Kuhnian paradigm are discussed, alternatives that share a recognition of the relative autonomy of philosophy from history. Hence, they assume a less tight relationship between philosophy and history of science than is the case within the Kuhnian paradigm.     

Intensions, belief and science: Kuhn’s early philosophical outlook (1940-1945)

Between 1940 and 1945, while still a student of theoretical physics and without any contact with the history of science, Thomas S. Kuhn developed a general outline of a theory of the role of belief in science. This theory was well rooted in the philosophical tradition of Emerson Hall, Harvard, and particularly in H. M. Sheffer’s and C. I. Lewis’s logico-philosophical works—Kuhn was, actually, a graduate student of the former in 1945. In this paper I reconstruct the development of that general outline after Kuhn’s first years at Harvard. I examine his works on moral and aesthetic issues—where he displayed an already ‘anti-Whig’ stance concerning historiography—as well as his first ‘Humean’ approach to science and realism, where his earliest concern with belief is evident. Then I scrutinise his graduate work to show how his first account of the role of belief was developed. The main aim of this paper is to show that the history of science illustrated for Kuhn the epistemic role and effects of belief he had already been theorising about since around 1941.