Alternatives to a Realist Position
One alternative to a realist position (see critical realism in science and religion) is the
claim made by what is referred to as the ‘strong programme’ of the sociology of
science - that science is simply a social construction, rather than an attempt
to describe a real world. Such a claim appears to suffer from major defects.
For one thing it runs counter to what almost all practising scientists think
they are doing. Its main problem, however, is that of reflexivity. If it were
the case, then no human analysis could be more than a social construction, so
the social scientists who made this claim would have to face up to the
implication that their analyses and conclusions
suffered from the same problem of being socially constructed. These analyses
would not be saying anything true about how the world is or about what
scientists are actually doing, but only reflecting the results of the
sociologists’ own social conditioning.
The most profound challenge to critical
realism in science comes from views coming under headings such as
‘instrumentalism’ or ‘constructivism’. These focus on the impossibility,
already mentioned, of detaching data from the instrumental and experimental
design which produced it. Given that we can neither think nor speak nor engage
with the world at all except through language, theory, and concept, there can
be no way to step beyond our theoretical frameworks and assess directly how
adequate any particular theory is to the complexity of reality. It should be
noted moreover that science undergoes major periods of change in which old
theories are discarded and radically new ones adopted. Consequently many
philosophers of science have argued that it is better to make no realist claims
at all, but merely to regard scientific data as, however successfully, a
function of the instrumentation, and of the conceptual constructs, by which
science functions. In the language of the metaphor of the maps, this view would
hold that our map gets us about on the particular contrived journey that is
science (just as a map of the London Underground gets us around the city) but
we have no real idea what the streets are like which surround our path.
The major problems, then, for realists,
even followers of critical realism, are the
theory-ladenness of data, the underdetermination of theory by experiment, and
in particular scientific revolutions in
which supposed points of reference to reality have to be discarded because a
radically new ‘paradigm’ takes over within a science.
The major problem for instrumentalists is the sheer success and apparent
progressiveness of science. Its maps seem to work, in general,
astonishingly well. It is hard to credit that an electron is an instrumental
fiction, even though no-one has ever seen one directly, since so many phenomena
have been observed in accordance with the behaviour and properties of
electrons.
To follow this debate in more detail see in
particular Laudan (1977)and Banner (1990).
Particularly important to critical realism
is the concept of inference to the best
explanation. Granted that we cannot be sure that data correspond in any
simple way to reality, we can nevertheless consider a variety of explanations
of the data, and elicit the one that best fits our criteria of
comprehensiveness, consistency, and compactness. (See judging the fit between
data and reality). For a recent defence of inference to the best explanation
see Clayton (1997).
We can understand more about the
similarities and differences between claims to realism in science and in
theology by looking at the role played by model and metaphor in these two
rationalities. Click on the role of model and metaphor to explore this.
Or investigate applying critical realism to
theology.
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link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
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