Rationality and Reality: Conversations with Alan Musgrave

336 Pages·2006·1.33 MB·English

by  Colin Cheyne

Rationality and Reality
STUDIES IN HISTORY
AND PHILOSOPHYOF 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
JOHNWORRALL
London School of Economics,
London, UK
AC.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 AADordrecht, 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
isArts 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. Instrumentalism,
pragmatism, constructive empiricism, social constructivism, conceptual idealism,
et alia—all are antirealistic views of one kind or another. Constructivism or
conceptual idealism is especially obnoxious because it is pre-Darwinian. Darwin
tells us that human beings are the product of a pre-existing world containing
unobserved creatures such as dinosaurs and unobservable entities such as quarks.
Constructivism reverses this process, making the pre-historic world and its denizens
the products of human beings and their minds or words or concepts or whatever.

1 I have drawn on Robert Nola’s interview with Alan Musgrave throughout this Introduction.
1

C. Cheyne & J. Worrall (eds.), Rationality and Reality: Conversations with Alan Musgrave, 1–6.
© 2006 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.