Psychology and the Science debate: A reply to Alex Berezow

The question as to whether psychology is a science is something of a cliché.  It is asked as though one is expected to obtain brownie points by just mentioning it, used to re-enforce one's opinion about what and how science should operate, and at times is used as an example to justify one's own profession.  It is hence evoked with little to no thought about the 'nature' of psychology and takes for granted how science operates.

When people speak about something not being 'scientific', they tend to look down on the subject and disregard it as if it has fallen from the grace of truth and correctness.  Indeed, the term science itself is also taken for granted as it is blindly absorbed into 'everyday speak' to the extent that when someone hears something being 'scientifically proven', they automatically assume its superiority over and above things that are deemed unscientific, when in reality science doesn't really prove anything at all.

Personally, I don't believe it is of any benefit (other than perhaps the need to vent one's agression) to treat psychology like a 'tug-of-war between being a science or not because in almost all cases people - scientists included - summon the term rather blindly.  Those (scientists) that are familiar with the role that science plays in their own field loosely take it and try to fit it in, or apply it, to psychology without giving any consideration or thought about the complex subject matter psychology is actually dealing with.  The primary sin they are committing is to pass judgement from something they know to something they don't.

Alex Berezow, who holds a microbiology doctorate, is, I believe, one such person.  In his reply to psychologist Timothy Wilson's resentment at being dismissed as a scientist at a university meeting one day, Berezow claims that such a dismissive attitude scientists have toward psychologists isn't rooted in snobbery [As Wilson claims], but is rooted in intellectual frustration.  Berezow then cements his position by proclaiming that psychologists fail to acknowledge that they don't have the same claim on secular truth that the hard sciences do, and then goes on to sympathise with the tired exasperation that scientists feel when non-scientists try to pretend they are scientists.  Berezow then asserts provokingly: [T]hat's right.  Psychology isn't science. 

Perhaps he is right.  But I do not care whether psychology is to be regarded a science or not.  What I do care about and oppose is the attitude levelled against psychology when it is disregarded by those like Berezow - the so called holders of secular truth - when they feel that it doesn't fit in with their own view of things.  

Given Berezow's academic credentials - a doctorate degree - I find it quite striking that he has taken the time to publish his article in the Los Angeles Times, given his lack of psychological knowledge and somewhat unsympathetic view to its method of investigating psychological 'data'.  But whether he holds a doctorate or not, to come from a different profession and attack another without qualification is like searching for a hated Youtube channel and leaving a nasty comment before logging off.  Incase Berezow hasn't noticed: Psychology is not a chemistry a physics or a biology.   It is no geology and certainly no astronomy.  Psychology is very different in that its subject matter is concerned with human behaviour and, indeed at bottom, the mind.  This is perhaps the most important point and one that seems to have slipped Berezow's mind completely.

The problem thus facing psychology is not the discipline itself, but its subject matter.  Berezow perhaps takes for granted the fact that when he goes to the lab and observes cells and other biological entities down a microscope, he is directly observing the intricacies of nature.  How great is that! Psychologists on the other hand, despite the technological advancements over the years, are inherently stumped in making any such observation other than inferring from behaviour.  Indeed behaviour itself is troublesome because people might not always behave in definite and predictable ways; indeed they can be very impulsive.  This isn't a problem with whether psychology is scientific or not, but a problem inherently bound up when one tries to explain and/or examine human behaviour either by a 'scientific' method or not.  I do not want to give the impression that psychology has not been able to predict human behaviour because it has.  Studies in social psychology, for example bystander behaviour, has demonstrated that patterns in human behaviour do exist.

Under such circumstances, it could well be argued that psychology is an even harder subject than the likes of biology in that its data is less objectively driven.  It is far easier to observe test and reproduce experiments to check for patterns in biology because there is no complex human mind operating behind the data.  Should Berezow ever feel tempted to dip into conducting a psychological study, then I'm sure he would appreciate the difficulties facing it.

In saying all this Berezow has 5 reasons why psychology isn't a science.  These are listed below

• clearly defined terminology
• quantifiability
• highly controlled experimental conditions
• Reproducibility
• predictability and testability.

Now, I am not going to go through them all because as much as they do pose problems for psychology, I don't think any psychologist would seriously disregard their field as a science because of them. Yet in saying that I think there are studies out there demonstrating that psychology can incorporate these criteria to a certain extent anyway.

To support his claim, Berezow provides us with the example of happiness as being a great example of why psychology isn't a science.  Happiness cannot be defined because it differs from person to person and especially across cultures, and cannot be quantified because psychologists cannot use a rule or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale. 

The great thing about Berezow's chosen example is that it shows how out of touch he is with what psychological research is all about.  Should he had read a little before hastily sending his article for publication, he would have seen little to nothing on studies on 'happiness', and more about cognition such as memory and intelligence research e.t.c.  How on earth are we supposed to take happiness as a prime example in refuting the entire subject of psychology when it bears no resemblance at all to what psychological research is all about?  Indeed, a part of me is crying out: 'is this guy serious?!'

But let us take his chosen example anyway.  Even though happiness might vary across cultures and that one cannot objectify happiness in-itself (whatever that might mean), but instead see it's effects - such as smiling or laughing - doesn't that allow us to infer that the person in question might be feeling, well, happy?  Indeed, perhaps the definition of being happy is in the word itself.  But I think this notion of inferring effect from cause is crucial to science across a range of subjects.  Take the electron or a black hole as a prime example.  Are they clearly defined?  And if so how clear is clear?  Niether electron(s) or black holes have ever been observed, but rather they're existence is inferred from the effects they make - cathode rays and the bending of light for example.  The same is true of happiness, we presume people are happy from some sort of effect.

Scales are common in measuring psychological data.  But if they are so detrimental to 'science', what other alternatives are there for psychology? Should psychology not bother at all, is that what Berezow is suggesting?  The mistake he is making yet again is to take something concrete from the physical sciences and apply it to psychology.  That is like trying to compare chalk and cheese.  All scales are in some way arbitrary.  Take the thermometer as an example.  A thermometer is just a tool used to extend our experience of the world.  Whether one records a temperature of 25 or 25.4 degrees, I don't think many people would really care.  But we associate a rise or fall in temperature with the rise and fall of 'numbers' - that in itself is completely arbitrary even though it might help give us a perspective of things.  Again the same is true in psychology.

Because Psychology fails to meet clearly defined terminology and quantifiability, Berezow claims that this makes it almost impossible for happiness research to meet the other three criteria.  

I don't think this is necessarily true.  I think it is possible to produce controlled experiments, reproduce, test and make predictions in terms of happiness research; but the real question is to what degree.  Remember, we are dealing with humans here.   So what is going to be happy for one person will differ to another for a whole heap of reasons - mood, life-style quality e.t.c.  But that shouldn't put us off being able to examine it in some sort of methodological way.  Indeed, there is no other way.

There is no reason for Berezow to be intellectually frustrated.  The label 'scientist' isn't reserved for people in particular.  It doesn't belong to anyone, nor should he feel that it is something only a minority of people can have access to if they study the right subjects.  In my view historians can be scientific in their own way just as biologists are in theirs.  But to claim that the so called hard sciences have unequivocal access to secular truth is disrespecting other researchers in other fields, and that calling psychologists pretend scientists is nothing less than ignorance.

© 2011 Roberto Nacci All Rights Reserved  

Freud and fairness – a reply to Marc Smith’s ‘Teaching Psychology isn't about Freud’, profiling serial killers or reading body language

Freud tends to receive in large doses both extremes of criticism; he is loved by some, notably by his ‘followers’ – the Freudians - and hated by others.  Hated so much so that there is a Facebook group dedicated to anyone willing to ‘like’ the ‘I hate Freud’ page.  Though it is clear that the majority of those deciding to ‘hate’ someone they don’t even know are college students, and for that reason are largely ignorant of the man’s work, there are others – those more academically and/or professionally qualified – who also choose to disparage Freud’s work without giving the man a fair assessment of his place in history and that of his contributions to the field of psychology.

One such person, an A-level Psychology teacher and chartered Psychologist, Marc Smith, who wrote a short article in the Guardian entitled: Teaching Psychology isn't about Freud, profiling serial killers or reading body language, argues that the general population do not understand what academic psychology entails and as a result tend to approach the subject with misconceptions.  As a teacher in the field, he says that many students expect to learn how to read people and interpret body language or profile a serial killer, and that he already knows that the first week of class will be spent dispelling the many myths that surround my discipline.

One such myth, according to Smith, is the widely held belief that Sigmund Freud was a psychologist.  As a result of people’s knee jerk reaction in answering ‘Freud’ to the question: name a famous psychologist? Smith believes that [T]his perhaps exemplifies some of the main problems with psychology today, in that the public has been raised on a sugary diet of pop psychology and self-help manuals. The reason for this, Smith believes, is that Freud wasn’t really a scientist because he didn’t gather and analyse evidence in an objective or scientific manner.  And that most of his theories were based on a small sample of middle-class Austrian women.  He then ends the article by suggesting that although Freud might come up in one’s study of psychology, this will probably be due to an attempt to compare his unscientific methods to those of the more evidenced-based cognitive and biological ones. 

As a psychology graduate myself, it is true that people hold misconceptions about what psychology is and more often than not, in my experience, they confused it with psychiatry.  However, I do not see, or have yet to come across, angry psychiatrists who feel the need to point this out.  Not everyone should understand a subject before they study it, especially at A-level.  True, misconceptions exist.  They exist everywhere.  But based on Smith’s article, it is clear that he too shares a common, be it lay, misconception about Freud, his ideas and his rightful place in the history of psychology as an influential psychological thinker. 

So the aim of this essay is to give Freud a fair, indeed, a more balanced assessment in the light of Smith’s rather dogmatic, and rather typical, college style arguments. 

Smith clearly draws a line between what he sees as a ‘proper’ psychology – i.e. the psychology of his own profession – and that of the less intellectually stimulating pop or quasi-psychology – such as the numerous ‘self-help’ books that fill book stores – with which he also associates Freud’s works as sharing this common unscientific category.  It is certainly not hard to sense intellectual prejudice being exercised here.  Psychology, for Smith, exists on a higher intelligence plain than does Freud’s fifty or so years of work in psychoanalysis.  And he disparages him by alleging in the name of science that his work is clearly of a lower standard, and hence should only be seen in comparison with how psychology is really researched and conducted academically.

Though Freud was no chartered psychologist and certainly not accredited or endorsed by any organization such as the BPS, it is ridiculous to judge the man by the standard of contemporary academic psychology.  Freud, if Smith had been bothered to read him, throughout his twenty-three volumes or so of work, was, though a trained neurologist, always concerned that his work be regarded as being a psychology.  His chief concern was with that of psychical reality and its development throughout one’s life.  Thus he was always questioning the role of external reality, hereditary factors, and perhaps most importantly, early infantile experiences, which all have the capacity to influence our psyche – such problems that to this day still plague contemporary psychology.  He was clearly one of the pioneers in elucidating the notion that early childhood experiences contribute to the shaping of the mind in later adulthood, an idea that seems universally taken for granted today – even by ‘professional’ psychologists.  Indeed, his contribution has had huge implications, especially in the growth of developmental psychology in which Attachment Theory plays an important rôle – as devised by John Bowlby (a psychoanalyst by training) and later by the work of Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation.  This in itself shows the influence Freud has had.

But Smith goes on to say that many in the profession would dispute and even reject outright his [Freud’s] psychological credentials.  Smith here is not talking about Freud’s theories, but is casting doubt on Freud’s authority as a psychological thinker and professional.  He is wrong to say so.  Freud was doing psychological work based on the method of psychoanalysis he devised in 1895 and constantly revised throughout his lifetime.  Though it must be said that it isn’t a perfect method – Freud himself  became sceptical of the notion of achieving a psychoanalytic cure for example – this method was used to investigate the intricacies of the mind – namely the unconscious and its connection with consciousness – in which he claimed to have discovered within the unconscious the inherent driving forces of pleasure (as well as aggression), forces that originate so far back in our early childhood, that a large portion of it remains shrouded in obscurity when one attempts to think back to such a time.  We can therefore thank Freud for his contribution to what is now called, and I think generally accepted, as being childhood amnesia.  In this regard Freud was going beyond psychology and delving into the depths of metapsychology (As can be seen in his metapsychology papers at the turn of 1914).  And perhaps this is the reason why people like Smith discredit him.

Psychoanalysis was indeed the psychological procedure Freud eventually came to adopt and use to conduct his work in the field of neurosis, work that helped bring mental conflicts to the fore and their concomitant irrational tendencies, impulsivities and desires which Freud came to recognise as fundamental problems for the psyche to master.  If it be the case that Freud has been very influential in building psychology to the state in which we view it today, how can it be justified to disregard his psychological credentials just because he is not a modern psychologist ? If many in the profession, as Smith likes to call them, believes we can totally reject Freud’s psychological credentials, then what of the many thousand of other professionals who claim the opposite – namely those practising as analysts in the Institute of Psychoanalysis and the British Psychoanalytic Association?  Should we slide them into the same bin as Freud and devalue their work as popular nonsense? In fact, I defy anyone to read Freud’s 1915 essay The Unconscious for example, and tell me that one derives the same sense of ‘ help’ as that afforded by reading Sassy, Single & Satisfied, Secrets to loving the life your living type books.  Freud was arguably even more academically stringent than most psychologists today.   
But it is the two very typical college-type evaluative criticisms that Smith regards as giving good reason to discredit Freud – namely, that his method wasn’t scientific and that the sample of cases on which he developed his conclusions was biased.  To my mind this indicates how poorly read Smith is in this subject.  Indeed, if Smith believes that such arguments can easily persuade us to drop Freud into the waste paper basket once and for all, then he has a huge mountain to climb in order to persuade the hundreds of psychoanalytical societies across the globe to embrace this stance.

We must remember that at the time Freud was practising, his method was centred on talking and listening to his patients.  His method was a therapeutic, not a strictly academic, one, which gave him insight into his patients’ personal thoughts about their paternal relationships and the transferences they projected out toward him. Although I am not a practising psychoanalyst, I have read a lot of Psychoanalysis and, with an open mind, can appreciate that Freud developed psychoanalysis over many years of seeing many patients.  It is only natural that sooner or later patterns in the subject’s free associations and/or transferences would soon emerge.  From these patterns, Freud undoubtedly drew inferences and hypothesis.  One such hypothesis he developed during the early years of psychoanalysis was the existence of infantile sexuality (c. 1905), and it was through the analysis of the case of little Hans in 1909 (an analysis established through Han’s father) that he went on to confirm it.  But even therapeutically, Freud adopts a method of obtaining data from such free associations and utilises the force of suggestion as a tool in gaining an insight into the psychological realm.  In both these approaches I would agree with Freud’s claim that he was being scientific in his approach to his patients.  Though it is clear he is not adopting statistical analysis nor designing research methodologies, as psychologists today tend to do, Freud is conducting his own method of investigation as based, fundamentally, on one person at a time.  In my view it is misplaced to disparage Freud as being unscientific, as Smith thinks, because insofar as a form of therapy, it provided at that time a relatively valid basis for his theories, and a way of obtaining and interpreting universal psychological phenomena.  Though one can question and indeed argue that fundamentally Freud’s theories boil down to subjectivity and interpretation, contemporary academic Psychology faces precisely the same problem save that statistics now provide a firmer indication of the degree of confidence one can place in one’s hypotheses.  Such confidence though relies on the strictness of the research methodology in question and might therefore appear to be more scientific to the eye.  But I would challenge the notion that this gives Smith the right to presume psychological superiority over Freudian thinking.  It is surely indisputable that Freud’s pioneering psychological work has yielded rich ideas and theories which still hold today despite its lack of a significant p value. 

In considering Freud’s way of conducting psychoanalysis, how objective was his gathering and analysing of evidence ?  Clearly, one can only infer from observing the actions of people that something is going on inside their heads.  For Freud these actions consisted of free associations, transference and dreams.  Although the latter appears to send shivers down the spines of psychologists as being mystical hocus-pocus, modern Psychology also ‘observes’ people and their actions, leading to hypotheses and inferences based on observations – just as psychoanalysis does.  Though it might be able to ‘control’ certain variables and test them in specific ways, psychoanalysis allows for some freedom of movement in such variables. 

But still, and more to the point, if Smith had actually read Freud he would have noticed that he too was fully aware of the problems and limitations psychoanalysis had to offer.  Though he was adamant that his work be considered scientific, he was fully aware of, and also pessimistic, to the view that his theories could be ‘proved’, or at least corroborated, during his own lifetime.  As a result of this he claimed that ‘proof’ of his theories lay in the future – something neuroscience is now beginning to take notice.

The second and final argument put forward by Smith is one routinely levelled at Freud and, I think, starting to become a habitual knee-jerk reaction by those studying or familiar with the A-level in Psychology. It is the classic sample bias argument: because Freud mostly analysed Austrian middle-class women his detractors allege that his theory is unscientific and therefore bogus.  If only it were as simple as that.  Freud could only analyse those willing to come to his practice and these happened to be Austrians because, surprise surprise, he was practising in Vienna, Austria.  It would have been nice if he had had access to Italians, Americans and Asians but being restricted to a particular place and period in history he unfortunately didn’t have access to Easy Jet – though he did analyse Carl Jung, a Swiss, on a ship halfway across the Atlantic; doesn’t that count?  Still, the fact that Freud analysed middle-class women in the early 1900’s doesn’t detract from the fundamental tenant of his theories ; on the contrary, ‘his sample’ provides us with a historical perspective about the society the man was practising in at the time.  Indeed, in discussing the possibility that his critics would be shocked at his open discussions of sexual matters with a young girl in his practice, Freud quoted Schmidt: but let no one reproach me on this account but rather accuse the spirit of the age. And so we should not blame Freud for his so-called biased sample, but rather exult in the fact that it allows us a deeper insight into the zeitgeist of the times save the analytical work he also conducted on men. 
But, more importantly, this criticism does little or no harm at all to Freud’s ideas about the unconscious aspects of sexuality, because, for Freud, the unconscious and its contents remains the same for everyone. 

I agree with Smith that contemporary psychology and Freudian thinking are inherently different subjects.   But whereas Smith is adamant in separating Freud from what he believes is a real and more honest psychology, I personally would like to see more psychologists – not only read Freud – but take a more balanced view of his ideas and attempt to incorporate the results of his work – as the International Neuropsychoanlysis Society attempts to do – into their own field.  

References to Smith's article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/2012/jul/12/teaching-psychology-science

And for those who hate...https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Hate-Freud/354204101436

© 2011 Roberto Nacci All Rights Reserved

Can scientific theories describe an unobservable reality underlying the phenomena?

Can scientific theories describe an unobservable reality underlying the phenomena?

Theoretical claims in science concerning unobservable entities, such as electrons, have sparked an on going debate between realism: the notion that such unobservable entities are real, and anti-realism: the notion that they are not real[*].

This essay will firstly outline a general definition of a scientific theory before moving on to give a brief account of Bas Van Fraassen’s theory of constructive empiricism.

Lastly, this paper will attempt to argue against this theory by claiming and concluding that the progress and success of science provide us with a good reason to believe that such entities are real.

                                   

I

What is a scientific theory? It is a scientific model which follows a specific cycle.  Firstly, some regularity in nature is observed before theories are inferred from observation.  In the majority of cases, scientific theories often postulate entities that are unobservable but deemed real by realists.  However, anti-realists disagree; they argue instead that such entities are not real.

One such anti-realist is Bas Van Fraassen.  He argues that, contrary to the realist position, the aim of science is not literal truth.  Hence accepting a scientific judgement or theoretical position entails that one suspends judgement of the term.  For Van Fraasen ‘a scientific theory is empirically adequate exactly if what it says about the observable things and events in this world is true – exactly if it saves the phenomena’.[1]  This is Van Fraassen’s own version of anti-realism, and he calls it ‘constructive empiricism’.  Scientific theories, for Van Fraassen, are only empirically adequate if it can explain observables in the phenomenal realm.  Therefore, we cannot know and should not excite any tendency toward any entity beyond the ‘realm’ of observables.

II

Van Fraassen makes a pseudo-Kantian distinction between an observable and unobservable realm[†], and claims that it is ‘naïve’ to think that the entities postulated by theories are real things.  For example, in 1897 J.J Thompson theorized that the only sound explanation for the behaviour of cathode rays was down to tiny charged particles called electrons.  Although they were inherently unobservable, the electron provided the best explanation for the behaviour of such rays.  Though electrons are inherently unobservable, physicists take such entities seriously and consider them as real entities though not strictly observable.  They are not agnostic about them since they have reason to believe that such things are real in the world (beyond the phenomenon). 

One of the reasons they have this belief is because they believe such theories are successful, to a certain extent, in explaining observable phenomena[‡].  For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity has been deemed successful in explaining how gravity operates even though we cannot observe gravity directly as something observable in itself.  Of course, this is not to say that the theory is perfectly accurate, it may well not be.  But generally speaking, it doesn’t matter whether theories such as these are completely accurate – indeed can this be ever the case? – what matters is that they tend toward, or converge to a high degree of accuracy.  Contrary to both Van Fraassen’s claim that science aims to describe literal truths and Laudan’s assertion that because the history of science is packed with successful but incorrect theories, it is wrong to suggest that these theories refer to real entities[2]; these arguments do not show that entities postulated by scientific theories are not real and neither do they suggest that as a result we should propose an agnostic stance toward them.   Scientists must always allow for misinterpretations or miscalculations of the thing in question.  This could well be due to a lack of understanding the entity or due to the current limitations of technology that inhibit us in gaining a deeper insight into them. 

What is important is that theories are converging toward, or, at least, tracking[§] the truth within a certain degree of accuracy.  Van Fraassen’s claim that science aims for literal or complete truth is far too strong an assumption for realists to take seriously.

Others such as McMullin have argued that scientific theories are progressively successful in terms of their fertility: they are productive and inventive, and that they bring with them many avenues for further development.  This seems to suggest that ‘structures postulated by the theory correspond reasonably well to the structures of the real’.[3]  Because we have theories that postulate entities like quarks, dark matter, and protons; their power of explanation leads us to believe in a reality underlying our level of the phenomenon[**]. 

Admittedly, Van Fraassen would probably claim that such theories are fertile, or tracking the truth only in an empirically adequate way; that is, they are tracking the truth within the realm of observational entities, and not tracking the truth in terms of these unobservable ones.

But what does he mean by observable? In Van Fraassen’s words: ‘all observable phenomenon are as if there is a mouse in the house”[4], meaning that we should only be concerned with theories that help us explain the observable entities in question. 

But suppose we take Van Fraassen to his word and observe a mouse that just happened to trot along the floor while I write this essay.  Does this stop me from inferring further things about the mouse? Suppose I infer that the mouse has lungs.  Should I be agnostic because they are inherently unobservable to the naked eye?  No, of course not.  Although I cannot observe the mouse’s lungs directly, I can detect them if I look closer, for example from its breathing.

 

We can also extrapolate this analogy to a more scientific example like our electrons.  Although no one has ever observed them directly since their discovery in 1897, we are still able to detect them and use this knowledge to create things like computers.  Therefore, given the choice between agnosticism or the belief that they are real features of the world it is entirely rational to assume the latter.

Hilary Putnam argues similarly, that if we don’t at least believe in the reality of such entities, then the fact that they can explain things would be miraculous[5].   Although Van Fraassen agrees that the success of science cannot be miraculous, he instead offers a Darwinian explanation for their success.  Like organisms, scientific theories struggle for survival, and therefore, the ones that survive are the ones that are successful in explaining the phenomena, while the others die away.  It is inevitable then, that the theories that survive are the successful ones.  Although it is difficult to compare the likes of an organism to a scientific theory, it is my interpretation that Van Fraassen is accepting the theory of evolution as only ‘empirically adequate’ without believing its truth.  This is surely problematic; for if he doesn’t believe in its truth, then how can he use it confidently to explain the success of scientific theories?  Van Fraassen must have a belief, vague or otherwise, in the power of evolutionary processes, even though such processes are inherently unobservable.  I see no reason how one can accept a theory, use it for argumentation or to make a point without actually holding a believing in them.  Any element of belief surely deviates, one way or another, from strict agnosticism. 

In this sense, I see no problem with scientific theories attempting to describe an unobservable reality behind the phenomena.  I say it is attempting to describe because it is impossible to be absolutely certain that theories are completely accurate.  Nevertheless, this element of scepticism should not necessarily lead us to agnosticism, for there is much reason to believe that unobservable things are real in an implicit sense - scientific progress shows this.

No doubt, many physicists today would claim that things such as electrons and other small particles like photons are now part of our phenomenal world; since machines can now detect them.  In the past, such entities were undetectable and hence no scientific indication for their existence could be put forward, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t exist at that time.  Over time, then, unobservable things shift to being observable.  If that is so, is Van Fraassen justified in making such a distinction between them in the first place? Grover Maxwell argues that we have no criteria in drawing such a line since there is a continuous state of transition between them[6]. 

Maxwell is saying that everything in the universe has the potential of being observed at one time or another.  For example, we can observe and detect things far out in the cosmos now which the ancients could never have done, but the potential for observing these things have always been possible.

Van Fraassen argues against Maxwell by claiming that such a distinction is possible.  He gives an example of a charged particle traversing inside a cloud chamber.  While travelling it leaves behind a trail.  Van Fraassen states that ‘while the particle is detectable by means of the cloud chamber, and the detection is based on observation, it is clearly not a case of the particle being observed’[7].  Admittedly, we can’t observe such small particles with the naked eye, however if the aid of instrumentation provides us with a certain amount of confidence in that something is causing this trail, then is it not reasonable to assume that there is something real going on?  What is interesting about this example is that Van Fraassen is perhaps inexplicably admitting that the cause of this trail is due to a charged particle although he cannot ‘see’ it directly.  Such a claim, then, is not a totally agnostic one; it would seem that the particle is more likely to be a real entity than not. 

To summarize, this essay argues against Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism while arguing that the success of science provides us with grounds for believing, at least, that unobservable entities are real in the sense that science tracks or converges toward truth.  It has argued that his agnosticism cannot be totally sustained given the progress of science, and distinctions between what is observable and unobservable.  Both provide us with sound reason for the belief that entities postulated by theories are more real than not.

© 2011 Roberto Nacci All Rights Reserved

If you would like to use this essay for academic or other purposes, please contact the author for permission first.

References

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[*] In the remainder of this essay, I will take real to mean something that exists in the world as opposed to something imagine or supposed.

[†] Pseudo because, unlike Kant, Van Fraassen does not make the distinction between the world as it appears to be and the world as it really it in reality.  He, instead, makes the distinction between observables and unobservable time.  But such ‘realms’ exist in space and time.

[‡] Known as: the success of explanation argument.

[§] Tracking the truth is a phrase initially coined by Robert Nozick – knowledge is belief that tracks the truth – since we cannot claim that scientific theories literally describe the truth as complete; instead they track it within a certain degree of accuracy – the history of science shows that progress is being made. See: Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations. Harvard University Press. (1981)

[**] Some anti-realist philosophers of science have pointed to the fact that the ether theory (that light travels in a medium named the ether) was never found.  Indeed, it is true.  But, this could well be due to the lack of understanding the nature of light at the time.  But this isn’t so detrimental to realists as it allows, as science progresses, to create more accurate theories that tracks truth.

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[1] Van Fraassen, Bas (1980): ‘Arguments concerning scientific realism’, In Curd & Cover (1998): Philosophy of Science; the central issues, p. 1069

[2] Laudan, Larry, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism”, Philosophy of Science, 48 (1981), pp. 19 - 49

[3] McMullin, E. (1976), ‘The fertility of theory and the unit for Appraisal in Science’, in R.S. Cohen, P.K. Feyerabend and M. W. Wartofsky (eds), Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, In Robert Seagull, Fertility and Scientific Realism, British Journal of Philosophy of Science, 59, (2008), p.237

[4] Op cit. Van Fraassen (1980), p.1077

[5] Putnam, H, (1975), Philosophical papers, Volume 1, Mathematics, Matter and Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University press.

[6] Grover Maxwell, On the ontological status of theoretical entities, In In Curd & Cover (1998): Philosophy of Science; the central issues, pp. 1055 - 1056

[7] Op cit. Van Fraassen (1980) p. 1073