Understanding Perspectivism

Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects

Michela Massimi, Casey D. McCoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351383394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in philosophy of science. The book brings together an array of essays that reflect on the methodological promises and scientific challenges of perspectivism in a variety of fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and cancer research, just as a few examples. What are the advantages of using a plurality of perspectives in a given scientific field and for interdisciplinary research? Can different perspectives be integrated? What is the relation between perspectivism, pluralism, and pragmatism? These ten new essays by top scholars in the field offer a polyphonic journey towards understanding the view called 'perspectivism' and its relevance to science.

1
Pragmatism, Perspectivism, and the Historicity of Science

Hasok Chang

1 Introduction: Humanism and Science

In this chapter, I wish to shed some light on perspectivism through the lens of pragmatism, especially in relation to scientific knowledge. The initial plausibility of this exercise lies in the fact that perspectivism and pragmatism share a deep humanist impulse, which is to regard science as a thoroughly human activity, even when it is aimed at the production of the most abstract and objective kind of knowledge. (Here I am using the terms “humanist” and “humanism” much more broadly than a strict reference to Renaissance humanism would dictate.) I will begin by outlining my interpretation of pragmatism in section 2; in fact, this is the first publication in which I attempt to lay out my view of pragmatism in any detail, so some details are necessary and this will constitute the longest part of the chapter. This will be followed, in section 3, by brief reflections on the relation between pragmatism as I understand it and perspectivism in its various guises. Afterwards, in section 4, I will explore one of the most important implications of pragmatism and perspectivism, namely the historicity of science and scientific knowledge. A methodological advocacy of “integrated history and philosophy of science” will naturally follow.

Humanism in relation to science is a commitment to understand and promote science as something that human agents do, not as a body of knowledge that comes from accessing information about nature that exists completely apart from ourselves and our investigations. Perhaps this humanism is not such a controversial stance (its roots go at least back to Immanuel Kant), but I think there is much value in considering its meaning and implications carefully. The most important thing about humanism as I see it is not a focus on the biological species Homo sapiens. For enthusiasts of artificial intelligence, animal cognition, or extraterrestrial intelligence, if we find or create serious non-human intelligence worthy of an epistemology, we might even want to call such agents “human beings” too.

In the rest of this chapter I will not speak explicitly of humanism, because I want to avoid the possibility of being mistakenly seen as advocating “human chauvinism.” Also, what I want to express by “humanism” can be adequately expressed by the designation of pragmatism, which I think is the best expression of humanism among existing philosophical traditions. The most fundamental point about pragmatism, as I take it, is that knowledge is created and used by intelligent beings who engage in actions in order to live better in the material and social world.

2 What Is Pragmatism?

2.1 Beyond Semantics: Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Practice

What is pragmatism, and what does it imply for the philosophy of science? It seems that pragmatism has largely fallen off the standard philosophy curriculum, so it may not be such a bad idea to start with a quick review of the standard meanings of pragmatism. Let us pick up from where today’s students and general public are likely to begin. Google defines pragmatism as “an approach that evaluates theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.”¹ In more and better detail, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1986) defines pragmatism as

an American movement in philosophy founded by C. S. Peirce and William James and marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief.

This is in fact quite a good definition. The first part of it is a version of Peirce’s “pragmatist maxim,” paraphrased by James here:

to attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.

(James 1907, 46–7)²

The Peirce–James pragmatist maxim naturally led to the semantic interpretation of pragmatism, which is perhaps the dominant one today. Christopher Hookway says, “the pragmatist maxim is a distinctive rule or method for becoming reflectively clear about the contents of concepts and hypotheses: we clarify a hypothesis by identifying its practical consequences” (2016, sec. 2). In this way, pragmatism shares much with operationalism, the homegrown philosophy of the Harvard physicist Percy Bridgman, and with the verificationism that was widely taken as a core doctrine of logical positivism. This focus on meanings continues in the current pragmatist works of Robert Brandom, Huw Price, and others.

In a similar vein, James presented pragmatism as a “method for settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable” (1907, 45). Unless some “practical difference” would follow from one or the other side’s being correct, the dispute is idle. Hookway (2016, sec. 1) recalls “a memorable illustration of pragmatism in action” by James, which shows “how the pragmatist maxim enables us to defuse an apparently insoluble (albeit ‘trivial’) dispute.” On a visit to the mountains, James’s friends engaged in a “ferocious metaphysical dispute” about a squirrel that was hanging on to one side of a tree trunk while a human observer was standing on the other side. James described the dispute as follows:

This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not?

(James 1907, 43)

James proposed to solve the problem by pointing out that which answer is correct

depends on what you practically mean by “going round” the squirrel. If you mean passing from the north of him to the east, then to the south, then to the west, and then to the north of him again, obviously the man does go round him, for he occupies these successive positions. But if on the contrary you mean being first in front of him, then on the right of him, then behind him, then on his left, and finally in front again, it is quite as obvious that the man fails to go round him, for by the compensating movements the squirrel makes, he keeps his belly turned towards the man all the time, and his back turned away. Make the distinction, and there is no occasion for any farther dispute.

(James 1907, 44)

In this manner, the “pragmatic method” promises to eliminate all apparently irresoluble metaphysical disputes, and rather more important ones, too.

Even though I completely endorse the semantic tradition of pragmatism, my own emphasis is different. My inclination follows Philip Kitcher’s (2012, xii–xiv) warning against the “domestication” of pragmatism. Focusing on semantics is a very effective method of domestication, making pragmatism look like a rather innocuous and interesting variation on normal analytic philosophy. I want pragmatism to be a philosophy that helps us think better about how to do things, not just about what our words mean. Recall the second part of the dictionary definition of pragmatism: “the function of thought is to guide action.” Hearing the story of James’s squirrel, one might wonder: “But isn’t this just a matter of defining one’s terms carefully? Does it really have anything to do with pragmatism?” My take on that question is that the disambiguation offered by James is tied closely to potential practical ends. If my objective is to make a fence to enclose the squirrel, then I have gone around the squirrel in the relevant sense; if the objective is to check whether the wound on his back has healed, then I have failed to go around the squirrel in the relevant sense. It is the pragmatic purpose that tells us which meaning of “going round” we ought to mean.

2.2 Pragmatism as Empiricist Realism

One very important reason why people often do not like to go beyond the semantic dimension of pragmatism is the fear of what happens if we go further and adopt the pragmatist theory of truth. This issue needs to be tackled head-on. It is a core part of my interpretation of pragmatism that we should reject the common misperception and prejudice that pragmatism just means taking whatever is convenient as true. The “pragmatic theory of truth” attributed to James is widely regarded as absurd, and this has contributed greatly to the disdain for pragmatism among tough-minded philosophers. Here is probably the most notorious statement by James: “‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion” (James 1907, 222). I think James’s choice of the word “expedient” was unfortunate, as sounding too much like just “convenient” or “useful”—or perhaps the word had quite a different connotation back then; that is for James scholars to debate. At any rate, the statement actually continues as follows:

And expedient in the long run and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas.

(James 1907, 222)

I want to argue that what this passage really shows is James the staunch empiricist, declaring that the source of truth is experience, and that it is futile to entertain any more grandiose notion of truth. This provides an important clue to my interpretation of pragmatism. My proposal is to understand pragmatism as a deep or thoroughgoing empiricism, which recognizes experience as the only ultimate source of learning and refuses to acknowledge any higher authority. Something does need to be said in justification of empiricism, but for now let me take it as a credo, as an article of faith; some sort of empiricism might be the inevitable starting point of epistemology in our scientific age, as much as the presumption of God would have been the inevitable bedrock of any intellectual discourse in Europe in an earlier age.

The spirit of empiricism has been summarized rather poetically by Clarence Irving Lewis, in his review of John Dewey’s 1929 masterpiece, The Quest for Certainty:

Man may not reach the goal of his quest for security by any flight to another world—neither to that other world of the religious mystic, nor to that realm of transcendent ideas and eternal values which is its philosophical counterpart. Salvation is through work; through experimental effort, intelligently directed to an actual human future.

(Lewis 1930, 14)

This passage is especially nice because it brings together the two pragmatist philosophers that I have found most inspiring.

On such an empiricist conception of knowledge, how might we make sense of traditional epistemic and metaphysical notions such as truth and reality? Central to my thinking is the notion of operational coherence, a harmonious fitting-together of actions that is conducive to a successful achievement of one’s aims.³ To put it somewhat more precisely: an activity is operationally coherent if and only if there is a harmonious relationship among the operations that constitute the activity. The concrete realization of a coherent activity is successful ceteris paribus; this serves as an indirect criterion for the judgment of coherence. Operational coherence pertains to an epistemic activity (or a system of practice), not to a set of propositions; it is measured against the aims of the activity (or system) in question. Coherence may be exhibited in something as simple as the correct coordination of bodily movements needed in lighting a match or walking up the stairs, or something as complex as the successful integration of a range of material technologies and various abstract theories in the operation of the Global Positioning System. It has social and emotional aspects as well as material and intellectual ones.

Coherence is the chief characteristic underlying a successful epistemic activity. It is the vehicle through which the mind-independent world is brought to bear on our knowledge. Operational coherence carries within it the constraint by nature, and in fact it is the only way in which reality can give input to our knowledge. Using this notion of coherence, I propose a new coherence theory of truth: a statement is true in a given circumstance if (belief in) it is needed in a coherent activity (or system of practice).⁴ Truth understood in this way comes with a specific scope or domain attached to it in each case, which allows us to legitimize intuitive statements such as “Newtonian mechanics remains true in the domain of macroscopic objects moving at low velocities.” And because coherence is a matter of degree, so is truth—and I think that is also right. J. L. Austin noted long ago (1979, 117, 130–131) that “very true,” “true enough,” and such are perfectly sensible locutions. Catherine Elgin (2017) has more recently shown the pragmatic power of “true enough” accounts. It is not necessary to conceive of truth itself as a binary yes-no property,⁵ and insist on speaking in terms of approximate truth or partial truth when we wish to discuss degrees of truth. The notion of (empirical) truth I propose can ground a kind of realism that is not at all contrary to empiricism.

2.3 The Empirical Learning of Methods

One salient feature of the deep empiricism that I see in pragmatism is empiricism concerning methods, which received its full articulation in Dewey’s late work Logic, which he strikingly subtitled The Theory of Inquiry. According to Dewey (1938, 12), scientific methods and logical rules arise from successful habits of thinking. Content and method are learned through the same process of inquiry. Success is being “operative in a manner that tends in the long run, or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Pragmatism, Perspectivism, and the Historicity of Science
• 2 Explanation, Interdisciplinarity, and Perspectives
• 3 What Is Perspectivism, and Does It Count as Realism?
• 4 Realism and Explanatory Perspectives
• 5 Universality and the Problem of Inconsistent Models
• 6 Representationalism in Measurement Theory. Structuralism or Perspectivalism?
• 7 Safe-and-Substantive Perspectivism
• 8 Charting the Heraclitean Brain: Perspectivism and Simplification in Models of the Motor Cortex
• 9 Cancer Modeling: The Advantages and Limitations of Multiple Perspectives
• 10 Perspectives, Representation, and Integration
• Contributors
• Index