From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Nov 22 2003 - 21:21:48 GMT
David,
David said:
I can't see any scientists thinking that your description is any use to them or anything like what they do. I thought scientists created theories and tested them experimentally. Do you object to this description?
Matt:
Never said scientists would find my description of use. Most scientists couldn't give three shits about what philosophers of science say about what they do. And I don't object to your description of science as creating theories and testing them. However, there are many ways to describe something and the pragmatist simply thinks some better than others, depending on context. The one above is good for laypeople and scientists, the pragmatist one good for philosophers wanting a non-Kantian way of describing what scientists do. The audience most of the time for a philosopher of science's description is not scientists, but other philosophers. But, they do think there is rarely, if ever, a context anymore that calls for locutions of this type: "science is the application of the universal scientific method".
David said:
Experiments do not have a causal effect on scientists, the data print out has to be turned into information via interpretation, the experimental results have a linguistic significance not a causal effect. Science, of course, has to take assumptions/theory to the data to make sense of it. Maybe you can explain what you are saying another way, your attempt above makes no sense to me.
Matt:
Pragmatists say that the only reason you insist that "experiments do not have a causal effect on scientists" and instead say that they have "to be turned into information via interpretation" is because you are using the metaphor of Nature as Conversation Partner. Pragmatists suggest dropping that metaphor because it makes us think you'll fall down the path of upgrading your messy, fuzzy interpretation for nice, crisp and clear mark-to-mark translation. The distinction in this case between interpretation and translation is that interpretation is driven by _our_ assumptions in making sense of things, but with translation the idea would be to uncover the _object's_ assumptions and use those. This idea pragmatists think bogus because nature doesn't _have_ assumptions, only people do.
But granted, you say critical realists, for whatever reason, won't make this move. So, like I said before, I'm not sure what the difference is between critical realists and Davidson's triangulation, between thinking that Nature enters into our conversation and thinking that scientific method is the "balance between respect for the opinions of one's fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation." (Rorty, "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope") Triangulation is simply the idea that there are three things involved in interpretation: you, your interpretive community, and nature.
The way pragmatists hash it is, because we don't think Nature talks to us, Nature instead has a causal effect on us. Regular ole' pushin' us around, making us see tigers and stuff. Pragmatists see no difference between the experience of the tiger and an experiment on electrons. An experiment is simply a reproducable experience. Scientists do it over and over to establish regularity in the experience, from which they can extrapolate theories about these regularities, thus allowing us to predict when certain regularities will occur given a certain set of circumstances. Coupled with Sellars' "all awareness is linguistic", pragmatists can say that nature causes us to have an experience, which is to say nature causes us to have a belief. The belief is already in _our_ language, so the first round of "interpretation" has already occured: the belief we were caused to have depends on the web of beliefs already in tow.
David said:
Where do you stand on realism, are you anti-realist or trying to get past this distinction?
Matt:
Pragmatists like to say that they are trying to get beyond realism and anti-realism, or as Richard Bernstein puts it, beyond relativism and objectivism. They take antirealists to be a stutter step beyond idealism, still making too much of the distinction.
Matt
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