Science as Process and Perspective – 06. Perspectival Realism

In this lecture, we look at the richness of our phenomenal world – with all its complexity occurring at different levels of organisation. A modern philosophy of science must take this complexity fully into account, and cannot simply attempt to reduce all phenomena to some simple fundamental level.

Here, I introduce the multi-perspectival realism of William Wimsatt, as expounded in his magisterial (and much underrated) book "Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings." Beware: it is not an easy read, but if you properly digest it, this book will change your view of the world radically, forever.

Wimsatt sees "robustness" as the central principle to ground scientific perspectives in reality, to secure the "reliability of our conceptual structures." "Things are robust if they are accessible (detectable, measurable, derivable, definable, producible, or the like) in a variety of independent ways." Science may not give us certain knowledge, but it can give us robust knowledge that we can trust. And we can assess the trustworthiness of our theories to distinguish them from less robust knowledge.

Wimsatt's philosophy (as his book title says) is firmly rooted in the conviction that limited beings cannot hope to have a complete explanation of reality. We must get beyond the myth of Laplacean omniscience. Instead, scientific theories serve to answer specific questions, or to address specific problems. They don't have to be perfect, but should provide heuristic solutions that are good enough, that satisfice in a given situation, to use Herbert Simon's term. Such heuristics only work under certain circumstances, but require much less effort that more general and refined solutions.

Wimsatt sees our edifice of scientific knowledge as an engineered artefact (a specific kind of social construct), with the characteristics of a complex adaptive system. As it grows and expands, some perspectives are built on top of others. The latter are said to become generatively entrenched. We better hope that entrenched perspectives are also robust. If they are not, their failure can take entire sectors of our knowledge down with them.

Scientific knowledge grows by what Wimsatt calls "the metabolism of errors." Systematic bias in the errors in our knowing is what guides us towards new discoveries. Detecting such bias (and other limitations) is greatly facilitated by comparing perspectives. This is why we need more, not less, different perspectives in science to get things right (as perspectivist philosopher Michela Massimi puts it).

The complexity of a system can be quantified by the number of non-overlapping valid perspectives that can be applied to it. While theoretical physics can do with few but very general theories, sciences dealing with complex systems require many localised models, each built on a different perspective. This is why the life and social sciences need a completely different philosophy than theoretical physics. They deal with completely different causal structures in reality.

Ron Giere compares perspectives, and the formal models that are built on them, with maps. Both of them are artefacts, which are neither simply true or false. Instead, they are applicable to a certain problem or situation (or not). Maps and models are interest-relative. The aim in either case is not to approximate and mimic reality as closely as possible, but to bring forth certain salient aspects that apply in a given situation.

In order to better understand what kind of map is good for what kind of territory, we must now turn our attention to the process, the activity, and the practice of doing science. We must switch our focus from representation to representing, from the facts that scientists produce to the activity of producing them. This will be the topic of the remaining lectures of this course.