Abstracts of Keynote Talks
Peter Vickers: Five Epiphanies in the Quest for Scientific Truth
Reflecting on over a decade of research in the broad topic area known as the “scientific realism debate,” I distil five key epiphanies that profoundly reshaped my perspective—not just on the nature of the debate itself, but on how we evaluate progress in philosophy.
One epiphany came in realising how much apparent disagreement is rhetorical. I found myself aligned, in practice, with many so-called anti-realists—Kyle Stanford among them—despite being cast as opponents in the literature. Another was the recognition that some of the debate feels like a game, more concerned with positions and labels than genuine insight. I also came to see the importance of second-order evidence: not just evaluating scientific claims, but scrutinising the reliability and structure of the evidence itself. A fourth insight was the value of bringing sociologists into the fold—social epistemology matters, and sociologists are not all crude constructivists. Finally, I realised that if you want to know whether or not to believe a scientific claim, you shouldn’t simply ask a scientist—what’s needed is a broader, more reflective inquiry into how scientific consensus is formed.
Together, these epiphanies challenge conventional wisdom about scientific truth and realism, raising broader questions about the limits and possibilities of philosophical inquiry.
Stathis Psillos & Kosmas Brousalis: The “Localist” Turn in the Scientific Realism Debate: A Critique
Growing criticisms of the Scientific Realism Debate (SRD) advocate a “localist” turn, arguing that the striking diversity across scientific disciplines undermines the pursuit of universal epistemic principles and the validity of “global” arguments for/against their soundness—such as the celebrated No-Miracles Argument or the Pessimistic Meta-Induction—thereby necessitating a “case-by-case” approach. Localists, thus, contend that the traditional “globalist” SRD should be dissolved, giving way to a multitude of “local” debates.
However, disciplinary diversity alone cannot mandate localism without invoking particularism—a contentious meta-epistemological (and meta-ethical) thesis holding that the justification of beliefs/actions in no way depends on the provision of epistemic/moral principles. This contrasts with generalism, which maintains that justification is essentially tied to principles, implying that without principles, normative claims cannot exist. Establishing that the dispute between globalism and localism about SRD depends on the “deeper” dispute between generalism and particularism (concerning the nature of normativity) is far from trivial: we show that localists themselves often overlook this dependence by implicitly—or unwittingly—adopting generalist assumptions.
Moreover, even when particularism is endorsed, its radical implications are typically underappreciated. To clarify these issues, we introduce a reason-based “weighing” framework for theorizing epistemic normativity, highlighting the contrast between particularism and two forms of generalism: absolutist and pro tanto. Finally, we examine the impact of these positions on the localism-globalism debate in SRD.
Kyle Stanford: What’s Left of the Scientific Realism Debate?
Scientific realists and antirealists alike have largely sought to identify General Criteria of Epistemic Security picking out claims or aspects of our best scientific theories that we can be justifiably confident will be preserved as scientific inquiry proceeds indefinitely into the future. I argue that the historical evidence already accumulated over the last several decades gives us compelling grounds to abandon this search. But we should also reject the competing ‘particularist’ view that historical or philosophical investigations of science simply have nothing at all to add to scientists’ own efforts to determine the truth about nature. Indeed, extant investigations of the historical record already offer important epistemic lessons for scientists themselves and for any of us who wish to proportion our confidence in particular scientific beliefs to the full range of relevant evidence, if only we can stop seeing them simply as failed attempts to establish General Criteria of Epistemic Security. Abandoning this search for General Criteria of Epistemic Security also invites us to return to an earlier conception of a more unified natural philosophy in which the history and philosophy of science play a substantial, constructive, and complementary role in the larger naturalistic project of understanding both the world and our own place within it.
Leah Henderson: What the “local” approach to the scientific realism debate is good for
There has been a recent tendency to recommend a localist and naturalist strategy in the scientific realism debate, according to which the issue should be tackled case-by-case by focusing on the first-order scientific evidence. So far, this approach has been advertised as providing an escape from the allegedly unproductive ‘global’ dialectic in the scientific realism debate. It is also suggested that it may give the realist an easier time in combating the Pessimistic Induction. I argue that in fact the localist naturalist approach unlocks a powerful new challenge to the anti-realist’s use of the observable-unobservable distinction by making possible a ‘confrontation’ between the localist realist and the anti-realist verdicts on specific cases. I demonstrate how this works by examining three scientific cases, in each of which there is a rich and sophisticated scientific analysis of the uncertainty regarding the hypothesis in question, which is not well-tracked by the observable-unobservable distinction. I argue that a localist approach may actually serve an empiricist’s own aims better than versions of scientific anti-realism which are based on the observable-unobservable distinction. This opens up the possibility that an empiricist should actually be a scientific realist.
Anjan Chakravartty: Stances, Worldviews, and Philosophical Transformation
In the context of debates about scientific realism, voluntarists about epistemology hold that more than one “stance”, eventuating in different interpretations of the upshot of scientific inquiry (forms of instrumentalism, empiricism, and realism), may be rationally permissible. Philosophers have developed this view in several ways, and in previous work, I myself have focused on how different proposals embody different conceptions of epistemic risk – the risk of error one takes in asserting or denying a scientific claim, theory, model, or part thereof – and what degrees of risk are amenable to belief. According to voluntarists, different judgments here may be rational, which may account (in part) for the perennial nature of debates about realism. In all of this, however, an explication of why different agents adopt different stances has remained somewhat opaque. In this talk, I explore the role of affective responses to different worldviews associated with different epistemic stances, which may offer some partial illumination of the volitional agency involved in the “selection” of a stance. Furthermore, I argue that an appreciation of this may engender a philosophical transformation not only in our thinking about debates about realism, but also about issues of science in society, including education and public understanding.
Sandy Boucher: The Stance-Dependence of Arguments for Scientific Realism
The idea that scientific realism and anti-realism are, or are closely related to, epistemic stances, has grown in popularity following the work of van Fraassen, Chakravartty and others. Yet the dream of discovering a decisive stance-independent argument for scientific realism as a thesis – an argument that is, or should be, rationally compelling for anyone, whatever their prior philosophical commitments, who is willing to consider the arguments and evidence in an impartial way – dies hard, as recent attempts in this direction by Eronen, Strevens and others have shown. In this paper I argue these attempts all fail. All arguments for scientific realism as a thesis presuppose the realist stance. I also suggest that, paradoxically, arguments for versions of scientific anti-realism may also presuppose the realist stance, inasmuch as they assume that the specific realist thesis in question is on the table as a genuine option, even if it is ultimately rejected. For those who reject the realist stance, such realist theses are not even live options, so arguments against them are beside the point. In support of my claim about the stance-dependence of scientific realism in its various thesis-forms, I present several examples, discussed in greater length in my forthcoming book Empiricism, Naturalism and the Metaphysics of Biology, of realism disputes in the philosophy of biology, where epistemic stances are always in play, even if just implicitly. In these disputes, argument and evidence play an important role, but they are always downstream from stance choice.
Curtis Forbes: To be (or not to be) a Scientific Realist: Empirical Grounds for Prudential Reasons
The pragmatic turn in the scientific realism debate (Boucher and Forbes 2024) constitutes a shift in the types of reasons on offer for adopting or rejecting scientific realism, away from epistemic reasons (reasons to believe some position true, most rational, etc.) and towards prudential reasons (reasons to believe adopting or rejecting some position will be useful, beneficial, etc.). I argue this does not imply a shift away from empiricism, i.e. the conviction that evidence and experience should guide belief formation. Prudential reasons for adopting or rejecting a position can (and should) be grounded in empirical facts, e.g. regarding the likely practical consequences of adopting a position in some practical context or circumstance. I clarify this through discussion of a) the formal structure of prudential reasons, b) several contexts in which we might seek prudential reasons for adopting or rejecting scientific realism, and c) the methods by which we might empirically uncover and ground such prudential reasons. I conclude by responding to Arthur Fine’s (2018) objections to my “pragmatic, existentialist approach” to the scientific realism debate (2017), emphasizing that his argument holds only for prudential reasons proffered solely on a priori grounds, but not for prudential reasons proffered partially on a posteriori grounds.
