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Rationality and Reality STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE VOLUME 20 General Editor: S. GAUKROGER, University of Sydney Editorial Advisory Board: RACHEL ANKENY, University of Sydney STEVEN FRENCH, University of Leeds DAVID PAPINEAU, King’ s College London NICHOLAS RASMUSSEN, University of New South Wales JOHN SCHUSTER, University of New South Wales RICHARD YEO, Griffith University RATIONALITY AND REALITY Conversations with Alan Musgrave Edited by COLIN CHEYNE University of Otago, DDunedin, New Zealand and JOHN WORRALL London School of Economics, London, UK A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN-10 1-4020-4206-X (HB) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-4206-X (HB) ISBN-10 1-4020-4207-8 (e-book) ISBN-13 978-1-4020-4207-8 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com Cover: Photograph of Alan Musgrave used with kind permission of Gudrun Perin, Guelph, Canada Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2006 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed in the Netherlands. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors ix COLIN CHEYNE / Introduction 1 GREGORY CURRIE / Where Does the Burden of Theory Lie? 7 COLIN CHEYNE / Testimony, Induction and Reasonable Belief 19 JOHN WORRALL / Theory-Confirmation and History 31 DEBORAH G. MAYO / Critical Rationalism and its Failure to Withstand Critical Scrutiny 63 VOLKER GADENNE / Methodological Rules, Rationality, and Truth 97 HOWARD SANKEY / Why is it Rational to Believe Scientific Theories are True? 109 STATHIS PSILLOS / Thinking About the Ultimate Argument for Realism 133 MICHAEL REDHEAD / The Unseen World 157 ALAN CHALMERS / Why Alan Musgrave Should Become an Essentialist 165 ROBERT NOLA / The Metaphysics of Realism and Structural Realism 183 MARK COLYVAN / Scientific Realism and Mathematical Nominalism: A Marriage Made in Hell 225 NORETTA KOERTGE / A Methodological Critique of the Semantic Conception of Theories 239 GRAHAM ODDIE / A Refutation of Peircean Idealism 255 HANS ALBERT / Historiography as a Hypothetico-Deductive Science: A Criticism of Methodological Historism 263 ANDREW BARKER / Ptolemy’s Musical Models for Mind-Maps and Star-Maps 273 ALAN MUSGRAVE / Responses 293 Index of Names 335 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors are indebted to Robert Nola, David Papineau and Stephen Gaukroger for their invaluable assistance and advice, and to Alan Musgrave for his enthusiastic support. We are also grateful for the secretarial assistance of Chris Stoddart, Sally Holloway, and especially that of Kate Anscombe, who cheerfully and efficiently carried out the bulk of the manuscript preparation. We originally planned this book as a tribute to Alan Musgrave to mark his planned retirement from the Philosophy Department at the University of Otago in 2005. Subsequently this retirement theory was refuted, so this stands as a tribute to his work so far. We did not want it to be a standard festschrift; hence the idea of critical essays with Alan having the right of reply. We would like to thank all the contributors (including each other) for their cooperation in making this the testament to Alan’s standing in the profession, both in Australasia and worldwide, that we believe it to be. vii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS HANS ALBERT is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He is the author of Treatise on Critical Reason, and Between Social Science, Religion, and Politics, as well as many other books and articles on social science, economics, philosophy, and religion. ANDREW BARKER is Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Greek Musical Writings (2 volumes), Scientific Method in Ptolemy’s Harmonics, and several other books and many articles on ancient Greek music and musical theory. ALAN CHALMERS is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Flinders University, Australia. He is the author of What Is This Thing Called Science? and Science and Its Fabrication, and articles on the history and philosophy of physical science. COLIN CHEYNE is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University of Otago, New Zealand. He is the author of Knowledge, Cause, and Abstract Objects, and articles on epistemology and philosophy of mathematics. MARK COLYVAN is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author of The Indispensability of Mathematics, co-author of Ecological Orbits, and he has published articles on philosophy of logic, decision theory, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics. GREGORY CURRIE is Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham, UK and a member of the Philosophy Department. His most recent book is Arts and Minds. He is working on a project on narrative representations of agency. VOLKER GADENNE is Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Science at the University of Linz, Austria. He is the author of Philosophie der Psychologie and articles on philosophy of science. NORETTA KOERTGE is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History & Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, USA. Her early work addresses problems arising out of Popper's methodology. Recently she has edited anthologies that criticize postmodernist and feminist accounts of science, such as Scientific Values and Civic Virtues. DEBORAH MAYO is Professor of Philosophy and Economics at Virginia Tech, USA. She is the author of Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge which received the 1998 Lakatos Prize award, and was a Director of a NEH Summer Seminar in 1999 on Induction and Experimental Inference. ix x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ROBERT NOLA is a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. He has recently authored Rescuing Reason, co-authored Philosophy, Science, Education and Culture, and co-edited After Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend: Recent Issues in the Theory of Scientific Method. His current work is a book on scientific method. GRAHAM ODDIE is a Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Humanities and Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. He is the author of Likeness to Truth, and Value, Reality and Desire, as well as numerous articles on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. STATHIS PSILLOS is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Athens, Greece. His book Causation and Explanation has received the British Society for the Philosophy of Science President’s Prize. He is also the author Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science. HOWARD SANKEY is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has written on incommensurability, rationality and scientific realism. His publications include The Incommensurability Thesis and Rationality, Relativism and Incommensurability, as well as several edited volumes. MICHAEL REDHEAD was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, UK, specializing in the Philosophy of Physics. He was Vice-President of Wolfson College Cambridge. He won the Lakatos Prize in 1988, and is a Fellow of The British Academy. He is currently Co-Director of The Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the LSE. JOHN WORRALL is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics, UK. A former editor of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, he is the author of numerous articles in philosophy of science and is currently completing a book called Reason in ‘Revolution’: A Study of Theory- Change in Science. COLIN CHEYNE INTRODUCTION Alan Musgrave’s philosophical credo is encapsulated by the title of his 1993 book Common Sense, Science and Scepticism. But to say that Musgrave believes in common sense, science and scepticism is pretty uninformative. After all, many of his philosophical opponents are likely to claim as much. However Musgrave has a distinctive position on these matters in which they are closely interrelated, and this position has interesting and wide-ranging ramifications, encapsulated in their turn by the title of his 1999 Essays on Realism and Rationalism. For Musgrave it is simply common-sensical to believe that an external world exists independently of the workings of our minds and that the aim of science is to discover what we can about that world, even though we cannot hope to have certain knowledge of it. Musgrave’s robust common sense about the external world seems to have clashed with antirealist philosophies from the start. He tells of how as an undergraduate he was ‘both fascinated and repelled by Berkeley’s idealism. All that ingenuity wasted on a crazy view’ (Nola 1995, p. 311). Consequently, he has devoted his philosophical life, in one way or another, to uncovering the errors in Berkeley’s arguments, and to detecting and denouncing any arguments that threaten to lead to similar conclusions. Thanks to his clear-sighted view of what realism about a mind-independent world actually entails, Musgrave has not been short of targets. He has shown a remarkable ability to detect antirealist leanings, even those to which their authors may be oblivious. For example, according to Musgrave, Hilary Putnam’s internal realism is no realism at all, rather it is ‘Kant generalised and relativised’. If the external world is truly mind and language independent, then, on Musgrave’s view, any serious investigation of that world (science, in particular) is, and ought to be, a robustly realist enterprise. But when philosophers have turned their attention to science, the lure of antirealism has proved strong.
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