MINNESOTA STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Minnesota Studies in the PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE RONALD N. GIERE, GENERAL EDITOR HERBERT FEIGL, FOUNDING EDITOR VOLUME XIV Scientific Theories EDITED BY C. WADE SAVAGE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, MINNEAPOLIS Copyright © 1990 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo­ copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN 55414. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scientific theories/edited by C. Wade Savage. p. cm. -(Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science: v. 14) Some of these papers were originally presented at an institute conducted by the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science from 1985 to 1987. ISBN 0-8166-1801-1 I. Science-Philosophy. 2. Science-Methodology. 3. Science-Evaluation. I. Savage, C. Wade. II. Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. III. Series. Ql75.M64 vol. 14 [Ql75.55] 501-dc20 90-32932 CIP The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Preface vu Introduction 3 Seek and Ye Might Find Arthur L. Caplan 22 The Psychoanalytic Enterprise in Scientific Perspective Adolf Griinbaum 41 On the Nature of Theories: A Neurocomputational Perspective Paul M. Church/and 59 Are Economic Kinds Natural? Alan Nelson 102 Foundational Physics and Empiricist Critique Lawrence Sklar 136 Theories as Mere Conventions Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. 158 Rationality and Objectivity in Science, or Tom Kuhn Meets Tom Bayes Wesley C. Salmon 175 Bayesian Problems of Old Evidence Ellery Eells 205 Fitting Your Theory to the Facts: Probably Not Such a Bad Thing After All Colin Howson 224 The Value of Knowledge Brian Skyrms 245 Demystifying Underdetermination Larry Laudan 267 Dubbing and Redubbing: The Vulnerability of Rigid Designation Thomas S. Kuhn 298 Scientific Revolutions and Scientific Rationality: The Case of the Elderly Holdout John Worrall 319 Realism, Approximate Truth, and Philosophical Method Richard Boyd 355 Contrastive Empiricism Elliott Sober 392 Contributors 413 Consensus Institute Staff 417 Author Index 421 Subject Index 425 Preface From the fall of 1985 through the spring of 1987 the Minnesota Center for Philos­ ophy of Science conducted an institute-an ongoing conference-whose focal question was: Is there a new consensus in the philosophy of science? The old con­ sensus was of course logical empiricism, or positivism, the position forged during the first half of the century by Russell, Schlick, Carnap, Feigl, Reichenbach, Hempel, Nagel, and others, and dissolved during the third quarter by the criti­ cisms of Quine, Hanson, Feyerabend, Kuhn, and others. The explicit purpose of the conference was to ascertain whether, in the wake of this criticism and the resulting loss of focus and direction, some new consensus was emerging that might come to provide the same sort of structure and direction for the field as had the old consensus. For this purpose the field was initially divided into three tradi­ tional areas: scientific explanation, scientific theories, and scientific justification or evaluation. The present volume's predecessor and companion - Scientific Ex­ planation, volume 13, edited by Philip Kitcher and Wesley Salmon-contains papers in the first area. The present volume contains papers in the second and third areas. It is not a conference proceedings in the strict sense, for some par­ ticipants did not write papers and some wrote them afterward, and some papers were additionally solicited. Furthermore, at later stages two other areas were added to the agenda: the relation between history and philosophy of science, and recent developments in the philosophy of cognitive science. With few exceptions, these additional symposia are not represented in the two volumes. What then is our result? Is a new consensus emerging in the philosophy of science, either in general, or in the special areas represented by the two volumes? Comments here will be limited to the nature and acceptance of scientific theories. (Comments on scientific explanation can be found in volume 13.) The answer to the special question would seem to be negative. The syntactic view that a theory is an axiomatized collection of sentences has been challenged by the semantic view that a theory is a collection of nonlinguistic models, and both are challenged by the view that a theory is an amorphous entity consisting perhaps of sentences and models, but just as importantly of exemplars, problems, standards, skills, vii viii Preface practices, and tendencies. Similarly, several views of theory confirmation com­ pete for allegiance. The best confirmed theory is variously held to be the one with the greatest number and variety of observed consequences, the one with the highest degree of confirmation (probability) on the observed evidence, or the one that best explains the observed evidence. Some theorists regard a decision­ theoretic approach as superior to those above. Still others hold that theories of confirmation beg the question of whether theories are, can be, or should be "confirmed" and recommend replacing them by accounts of how theories are dis­ covered, accepted, and developed. The answer to the general question is more complex, partly because it applies to more areas than the traditional three above, and partly because it includes second-order questions about the nature and scope of philosophy of science (which naturally complicate the first-order questions). Nonetheless, the answer here also seems to be negative. The once dominant conception of philosophy of science as the logical analysis and reconstruction of science is generally regarded to be moribund, and no comparably general conception has replaced it. Philoso­ phy of science has become exceedingly broad and diverse. It now attends to prac­ tical and experimental science in addition to theoretical science, and it examines a virtually unrestricted range of sciences and scientific practices. It is no longer simply the logic and methodology of science, but involves in addition the history, sociology, and psychology of science. These developments have been accompa­ nied by the growing view that philosophy of science should be scientific, naturalistic. This view regards previous theories of the structure and acceptance of scientific theories as idealizations, and recommends replacing them by ac­ counts of what science is actually, in its natural psychosocial setting. Such studies have led some to conclude that science is not an objective, rule-governed, rational activity, and that its development is not a rational process. On one suggestion, the development of science is a process comparable to Darwinian natural selec­ tion. Another view is that, although scientific rationality cannot be equated with logicality, science is rational in a sense philosophers are currently attempting to explicate. The welter of conflicting views has suggested to many that the only consensus in philosophy of science is that there is no consensus. Indeed, the pluralistic ideol­ ogy currently in favor is unsympathetic to attempts to achieve or even locate con­ sensus, for fear that some new and equally stifling dogma will replace the old. It seems that to seek now for anything so definite as consensus in philosophy of science-some set of doctrines to rival the positivist consensus of earlier years - is premature at best. The field seems to contain too much diversity and too much ferment to permit it. Most of the essays presented here reflect the concerns and themes of current philosophy of science, either by pursuing them, or by criticizing them, or by at­ tempting to harmonize them with others, occasionally with some of the old con- PREFACE ix sensus. Although they do not constitute a new consensus, and perhaps do not even point toward one, they do provide a bridge between the old and the new. One goal of our institute was to survey current philosophy in a manner that would be useful to a general academic audience as well as to specialists in the field. As a consequence, most of the essays are relatively accessible, and the in­ troduction has been designed to increase their accessibility and usefulness to those who wish to sample the field. The volume should therefore be suitable for begin­ ning graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, as well as the more advanced contexts. We wish to acknowledge the support of institutions and individuals who made our institute on consensus possible. A major grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities provided most of the funds for the conference. (Philip Kitcher and Wade Savage were the principal investigators.) The College of Liberal Arts and the Office of the President of the University of Minnesota provided a substan­ tial supplementary grant. We thank them all. We also thank the faculty who staffed the institute; their names appear at the end of the volume. Finally, we thank the students and faculty who attended the lectures and contributed to the discussions. It was a stimulating experience for everyone involved. CONTRIBUTORS Contributors Richard Boyd is a professor of philosophy in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is the author of a long series of papers defending scientific realism, one of which appears in this volume. His other published works have been in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, semantic theory, the theory of natural kinds, and metaethics. Arthur Caplan is a professor of philosophy and member of the Center for Philoso­ phy of Science at the University of Minnesota. He is also director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and a professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota. Caplan received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University and has taught there and at the University of Pittsburgh.