Relativism in science?

Karl Popper

As I have said in other posts, quoting Popper, a scientific theory can never be considered utterly confirmed. In other words, we can never be completely sure that it is true. But some people try to rely on this (and on Kant’s philosophy) to reach the conclusion that we cannot know anything about reality, that scientific knowledge is relative, and that science is no different from other human activities, such as arts or fashion, whose productions cannot be said to be true or false.

Against this position, in an article published in 1990 in defense of realism, Martin Gardner wrote the following paragraph, which in my opinion hits the center of the bull’s eye:

Anti-realist answers to the no-miracles argument

Hilary Putnam

The previous post described the no-miracles argument, proposed by Hilary Putnam. The article ended thus:

What do anti-realists answer to this argument? Are they convinced?

I guess the readers have deduced that the answer to the second question must be negative, otherwise the debate between realism and anti-realism would have ended. Let us look, therefore, at the answer to the first question. Faced with the abductive argument of no-miracles, anti-realists answer in two different ways:

1.      Bas van Fraassen is an anti-realist American philosopher who criticizes Putnam’s argument, arguing that scientific theories are successful because unsuccessful theories have been eliminated by natural selection (i.e. scientists have ruled them out). Therefore, asking why science is successful is similar to asking why basketball players are tall: because they have been selected. Let us see how Fraassen describes his theory, which is called constructive empiricism:

The debate of realism and anti-realism

Gottlob Frege

The secular debate between realism and nominalism (or anti-realism, its now preferred name), has been expressed in a few new theories of the so-called analytical philosophy, whose origin dates from the early twentieth century, with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Circle of Vienna and several philosophers of the last fifty years, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Currently, the two camps, realist and anti-realist, agree on one thing: science works. But although this is considered an incontrovertible fact, very divergent positions are posed to explain it.

As it has always happened throughout history, neither of the two fields is united. Both realism and anti-realism are divided into two branches, at the least.

Let us start by describing the realist position:

Is physics losing touch with reality?

In his famous posthumous book The Discarded Image, published in 1964, a few months after his death, C.S. Lewis shows he is ahead of his time by predicting a situation that today, when it has become usual in physics, gives a rather bad forecast for the future of this science. Let’s look at a relevant quote:

The mathematics are now the nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable, modern physics speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as ‘making models’... Sometimes [the models] illustrate this or that aspect of [reality] by an analogy. Sometimes, they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics... By accepting [an expression such as] the ‘curvature of space’ we are not ‘knowing’ or enjoying ‘truth’ in the fashion that was once thought to be possible.