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Understanding Perspectivism This impressive collection is essential reading for appreciating the inevi- table contextualities of scientific knowledge. It explores how notions of “perspective” can illuminate the epistemic upshot of the sciences and how they are situated in their history, practices, representations, and sometimes competing aims, provocatively advancing debates about realism, pragma- tism, explanation, and modeling in the process, all through a wealth of cases from physics, biology, neuroscience, and medical science . —Anjan Chakravartty, University of Miami An excellent collection of essays on a topic rapidly establishing itself as an important interpretive programme in philosophy of science. One of the volume’s many merits consists in showing the diversity and versatil- ity of perspectivism while illustrating common features among its differ- ent varieties. The reader is thus provided an enormously rich foundation for evaluating the role of perspectivism in understanding science and its practices . —Margaret Morrison, University of Toronto Perspectivism is a fruitful metaphor for imagining alternatives to tradi- tional realism in philosophy of science. Massimi and McCoy have gath- ered ten essays which show how perspectivism is illuminating in areas such as molecular biology and measurement theory, and also explore the relationships between perspectivism and other recent accounts including pragmatism, structural realism, pluralism, and scientific modelling. There is an excellent balance of established and emerging scholars in the field. This volume is a superb, cutting-edge text to use in an advanced graduate seminar . —Miriam Solomon, Temple University Understanding Perspectivism This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in the 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 for 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 kaleidoscopic journey toward understanding the view called “perspectivism” and its relevance to science. Michela Massimi is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She was Co-editor-in-Chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2011–2016) and Vice President of the European Philosophy of Science Association (2015–2019). She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project “Perspectival Realism. Science, knowledge and truth from a human vantage point” (2016–2020). Casey D. McCoy is a Postdoc at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research falls primarily within the philosophy of science and the philosophy of physics, and he has written on topics including inflationary cosmology, fine-tuning problems in physics, and the interpretation of statistical mechanics. Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications Edited by Bana Bashour and Hans D. Muller Science after the Practice Turn in Philosophy, History, and the Social Studies of Science Edited by Léna Soler, Sjoerd Zwart, Vincent Israel-Jost, and Michael Lynch Causation, Evidence, and Inference Julian Reiss Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori David J. Stump Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science Edited by William M. R. Simpson, Robert C. Koons and Nicholas J. Teh Essence in the Age of Evolution A New Theory of Natural Kinds Christopher J. Austin The Instrument of Science Scientific Anti-Realism Revitalised Darrell P. Rowbottom Understanding Perspectivism Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects Edited by Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-the-Philosophy-of-Science/book-series/POS Understanding Perspectivism Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects Edited by Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Massimi, Michela, editor. | McCoy, Casey D. (Casey David), editor. Title: Understanding perspectivism : scientific and methodological prospects / edited by Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy. Description: New York : Taylor & Francis, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in the philosophy of science ; 20 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019006700 | ISBN 9781138503069 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Science—Philosophy. | Opinion (Philosophy) Classification: LCC Q175 .U475 2019 | DDC 501—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006700 ISBN: 978-1-138-50306-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14519-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Illustrations x Introduction 1 MICHELA MASSIMI AND CASEY D. MCCOY 1 Pragmatism, Perspectivism, and the Historicity of Science 10 HASOK CHANG 2 Explanation, Interdisciplinarity, and Perspectives 28 MELINDA BONNIE FAGAN 3 What Is Perspectivism, and Does It Count as Realism? 49 PAUL TELLER 4 Realism and Explanatory Perspectives 65 JUHA SAATSI 5 Universality and the Problem of Inconsistent Models 85 COLLIN RICE 6 Representationalism in Measurement Theory. Structuralism or Perspectivalism? 109 J. E. WOLFF 7 Safe-and-Substantive Perspectivism 127 DAVID DANKS 8 Charting the Heraclitean Brain: Perspectivism and Simplification in Models of the Motor Cortex 141 MAZVIITA CHIRIMUUTA viii Contents 9 Cancer Modeling: The Advantages and Limitations of Multiple Perspectives 160 ANYA PLUTYNSKI 10 Perspectives, Representation, and Integration 178 SANDRA D. MITCHELL Contributors 194 Index 196 Acknowledgments The editors, Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy, are grateful to all the authors who contributed to this volume for their enthusiastic engagement with the topic and the very many stimulating conversations over the past two years. Our thanks also go to Routledge editor Andrew Weckenmann for supporting this project from the beginning. This edited collection is the research output of a project that has received funding from the Euro- pean Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement European Consolida- tor Grant H2020-ERC-2014-CoG 647272, Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge, and Truth from a Human Vantage Point ). We are very grateful to the ERC for supporting our research in this area. Illustrations Figures 5.1 Multiple conflicting models (M1, M2, M3, M4, . .) might be connected to the same real-world phenomena via multiple overlapping universality classes (represented by the ellipses) to which the real-world system (R) belongs. M1 and M4 show that multiple model systems might be within the same universality class as well. 97 8.1 Illustration of cross-validation of quantitative models and divergence of qualitative interpretations of those models. Beer and Williams (2015) provide a demonstration of cross-perspective validation for their very simple, minimally cognitive agent. 151 Tables 2.1 Four-Place Taxonomy of Relations Between Models 38 8.1 Comparison of Intentional and Dynamical Perspectives 147 Introduction Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy Perspectivism (or perspectivalism, which one might want to call it) 1 has gained increasing attention in recent philosophy. Varieties of perspectivism have been advocated in several contexts. In epistemology, for example, Ernest Sosa (1991 ) originally put forward a perspectival account that was meant to go beyond the dichotomy between reliabilism and coherentism. Reflective justification for our knowledge claims is, ultimately, a matter of perspectival coherence on Sosa’s view. Along similar lines, perspectival justification has been advocated by Jay Rosenberg (2002 ) and, in the context of the debate on peer disagreement, by Kvanvig (2013 ) more recently. In philosophy of language, perspectivism has featured as a tie-breaker in ongoing debates about epistemic possibilities and the limits of contextualism and relativism (see, e.g., Bach 2011 ). In the philosophy of time, perspectivism has found its way both in an analysis of our phenomenal experience of time (see Torrengo 2017 ) and in foundational analyses about the time arrow in physics (see Rovelli 2017). And when it comes to causality and the causal arrow, there too perspectivism has been presented as a promising way forward (see Price
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