Prologue

version January 2016

J.E. Sipe

Whereof whats past is prologue; what to come,

In yours and my discharge.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1
Disputes about the answer to the question "what do the abstract elements of a theory
describe?" can be seen as part of a larger controversy about the nature of statements
in scientific theories. Such issues acquired a new urgency with the birth of modern
science, usually associated with the work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and others in the
early 1600s. Struggles to interpret quantum mechanics have brought new interest to the
discussion, but the battle lines were drawn long ago. By way of introduction, in this chapter
we highlight the main issues as they have been addressed over the centuries, without delving
into the particular problems presented by quantum mechanics. In later chapters we will
see how ideas that arose in these debates can and have been mined in efforts to interpret
quantum mechanics.
The question "what do the abstract elements of a theory describe?" has been traditionally
linked with another question, what is the aim of science? Responses to the second question
identify the primary goal to be either usefulness or truth. Broadly speaking, a theory is
taken to be useful insofar as it helps us to predict and control the world. Most would agree
that usefulness is one of the aims of science, but some would go further and say that it is
the only aim, arguing that the concept of truth is unintelligible, uninteresting, or that it
is ultimately just synonymous with usefulness, and that science is simply an instrument
for coping with the world. We call this view pragmatism. Its proponents allege that their
colleagues who claim to be worried about the truth are, whatever they assert, only engaged
in a proper scientific investigation when their efforts result in better ways of coping. And
most pragmatists would assert that this is how science has progressed historically, regardless
of the philosophical views of practicing scientists.
Those who argue that the primary aim of science is truth see its usefulness as derivative,
arising as a consequence of its truth. We divide the truth-seekers into two camps according
to their views on what it means to hold a theory to be true; we call the two camps realism
and phenomenalism. Very roughly, the issue is whether true theories correspond to the world
as it actually is, or whether they merely provide an accurate summary of the world as it is
experienced by us. The realist view is that scientific theories aim to provide a description of
entities existing independently of any observer, and that our experiences are ultimately to be
explained in terms of these entities. In contrast, the phenomenalist view is that scientific
theories should properly concern only the description and organization of our experiences
into a coherent scheme, and the study of relations between those experiences.
The central points of dispute between realists and phenomenalists concern what exists
in reality, the study of which is called metaphysics or ontology (from the Greek ontos,

meaning to be), and what we can know, the study of which is called epistemology (from the
Greek episteme, meaning knowledge). Both realists and phenomenalists generally presume
the existence and knowability of everyday objects, directly observable entities such as
tables, chairs, and coffee cups, the "phenomena" of our everyday life, which phenomenalists
typically understand as names for sets of our experiences. While realists typically associate
the same kind of existence and knowability to entities that are not directly observable, such
as neutrinos and quarks, phenomenalists recoil from such a generalization. Some deny only
the epistemological claims of the realist. They admit that some sort of unobservable entities
may exist, perhaps very different from what the realists of the day advocate, but argue that
in any case we can never really know anything about them. According to this view, good
science aims to provide a true description of what is directly observable, and nothing more.
Others deny the ontological claims as well, asserting that statements about unobservable
entities must either be understood as a complicated shorthand for a set of statements about
our perceptions, or judged to be devoid of meaning and eliminated from scientific discourse.
We focus here on how these differences affect the type of interpretation of a theory
a realist or phenomenalist is willing to accept. Modern scientific theories are generally
quantitative and often based on abstract mathematics. By an interpretation of a modern
physical theory, we mean an identification of the things to which the abstract elements
of the theory correspond, an answer to the question "what do the abstract elements of a
theory describe?" A realist interpretation links at least some abstract elements to physical
objects and their changing attributes, whatever they might be, and however the linkage
might be achieved. In traditional realist thought, a theory is true to the extent that those
abstract elements actually correspond to the entities that exist in the world. There is more
variability in how phenomenalists understand the abstract elements of a theory. However, all
believe that at least some of the abstract elements must be linked to the realm of experience,
whether through sensations, or directly observable objects, or experimental operations. For
pragmatists the matter of interpretation in this fashion does not arise. For them the abstract
elements do not correspond to anything at all; they are merely useful tools we use to help
ourselves cope, often in the broadest sense, with the world in which we find ourselves.
The various options we have outlined in the paragraphs above are shown in Fig. 1.
Although a good starting point, we will see later that this organization is oversimplified,
particularly in the light of recent thought. To be precise, we will henceforth use the terms
realism, phenomenalism, and pragmatism as well as other such isms that will arise in the
following to specify commitments to what it is that the abstract elements of a proper theory
refer. That is, we take the "bottom half" of Fig. 1 to indicate our definitions of these terms,
and the top half to show the traditional correlation of these commitments with views on the
aim of science.
We warn our readers that the terminology on these subjects is far from uniform. For
example, the term "realism" is often used merely to indicate belief in a mind-independent
universe, a use more general than ours, while the term "instrumentalism," which we will
introduce with one common definition, is sometimes used in a different way to identify the
full philosophy of the American philosopher John Dewey. And the meaning of a word
as used in a philosophical discussion can be very different than its meaning in everyday
language. For example, we characterize someone as "pragmatic" if they hold a particular
view of the role of the abstract elements in a theory, while "pragmatic" in everyday language

1. Interesting questions and possible answers

can just mean being sensible and practical. So readers comparing this chapter with the
writings of others should pay particular attention to the definitions of terms, which is good
general advice when reading on matters philosophical.
We turn successively to phenomenalism, pragmatism, and realism in the next three
sections. Our treatment will be necessarily brief with many oversimplifications. We have
had to wrench philosophers views on the nature of scientific theories out of the context of
their larger concerns, and simplify distinctions and disputes in our attempt to present a broad
overview. Interested readers should take this chapter as an encouragement to seek out more
detailed treatments of the matters that can be merely sketched here.

1 Phenomenalism
1.1

The roots of phenomenalism

The phenomenalist tradition predates the birth of modern science. A sixteenth century
example is the work of the science writer Patricius (1529-1597), in whose time there were
three competing theories of the motion of the heavenly bodies that could be understood as
realist. Ptolemy (circa 150) held that they all moved about the earth, which was fixed with
respect to the distant stars. Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) held that the sun and the moon moved
around the earth but all other planets moved around the sun. Copernicus (1473-1543) held
that the sun, not the earth, was fixed with respect to the distant stars, and that all the planets
moved about the sun while only the moon moved about the earth. Writing in 1591, Patricius
argued that the observations of the astronomy of the day the motion of the heavenly bodies
in the night sky should simply be studied and described as such. Any tables or mathematics
that aided in that description had to do with night sky observations, about which one could

2. Issac Newton (1642-1727)

be certain, and not about any imaginary universe of a Ptolemy, a Brahe, or a Copernicus.
It is easy to have some sympathy for Patricius, since in his day there seemed to be nothing
to distinguish between the three realist theories, let alone identify which was correct. They
all seemed to account for observations of the night sky. What is often surprising to modern
readers is that phenomenalism still attracted advocates after Issac Newton (1642-1727),
about a century later, could explain the motion of the planets about the sun. After all, within
an approach usually understood as realist, describing forces, masses, and the positions and
velocities of planets, stars, and earthly objects as actually existing, Newtonian physics
provided an extraordinarily successful and unified treatment of both celestial and terrestrial
dynamics that seemed capable of describing all motion.
One reason for the persistence of the phenomenalist viewpoint is that contemporaries
raised troubling concerns about certain unobservable entities in Newtonian mechanics,
such as forces that allowed particles to interact instantaneously even when far apart from
each other. Perhaps these strange entities were in fact not really there, but just part of
a formalism admittedly very useful in at least approximately correlating observations.
Generally disregarded by the followers of Newton in the flush of their successes, these
concerns later proved to be well-founded, as any student of relativity knows.
Yet scepticism about a realist understanding of Newtonian mechanics was also
strengthened by a kind of crisis in certainty, an intellectual trauma that followed the
success of the mechanical-mathematical approach to the study of nature begun, even before
Newton, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Earlier the world had been assumed
to be created and to exist for humanitys sake, and to be intelligible as it was immediately
presented to us. The Aristotelian categories still used for interpretation in the late medieval
period, such as essence, form, quality, and quantity, helped frame discussions of nature as it
was directly apparent to the senses. Fourteenth century scholars at Oxford University even
tried to understand variations in velocity as variations in the intensity of a quality, much

3. David Hume (1711-1776)

as a ripening apple varies in its redness. But as the scientific revolution progressed and talk
about essences and qualities gave way to talk about corpuscles and mathematical equations,
it began to appear that whatever was really out there in nature was pretty far removed
from the direct evidence of our senses. How could we be assured of any certainty in our
statements about a universe in which humans appeared now to be merely interlopers, rather
than the reason for its existence and the measure of all things?
This crisis contributed to the importance of epistemology in Western philosophy. The
new emphasis on observation and experiment brought the problem of how we acquire
knowledge into sharp focus: The evidence of our senses that we rely on in science is
notoriously unreliable, and arguably it is always doubtful. How do we even know that
we are not dreaming? How can we justify a belief in the real existence of even what
common sense tells us are ordinary physical objects, such as apples and tables? Such
scepticism culminated in the work of David Hume (1711-1776), who added doubts about our
presumption of the very regularity and lawfulness of nature. He claimed that our sensations
teach us only that events in the past have exhibited a particular kind of regularity: Day
follows night, objects released fall to the ground, and so on. This cannot, however, warrant
the assumption that this regularity will persist in the future. After all, how can we be sure
that at any time Nature will not suddenly begin to behave differently? A natural reaction is
to say, "We cannot be certain of the future, but we can surely have reasonable expectations.
After all, these regularities have held so far, so we can expect them to hold in the future."
Only a moments reflection is needed to see this begs the question: future regularity cannot
be logically deduced simply from past regularity.
So at the end of the eighteenth century a curious dilemma presented itself: Philosophers
found they had argued themselves into the necessity of scepticism, while those in the
developing scientific community and indeed even the philosophers seemed increasingly
sure in their commitment to the enormously successful physics of Newton and his followers.

4. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

The oft-quoted lines of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) illustrate the awe in which the
accomplishments of Newton and Newtonian physics were held:
Nature, and Natures Laws lay hid in Night,
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.
The success of Newtonian physics was so great, and seemed so universal, that most
thinkers of all stripes concluded that it had hit upon the final truth of how Nature is to be
understood. Surely we simply had to believe that there really were corpuscles, subject to
forces and moving through Euclidean space, with their positions as a function of absolute
time described by Newtons laws! An important issue of the day was how this belief could
be justified.
A solution was offered by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant
began by rejecting the notion that the mind plays a passive role in experience, that it is
simply the tabula rasa, or blank slate, onto which Hume and earlier British philosophers
had assumed our experiences are written. He argued that in interpreting experience the mind
brings certain categories to bear in an active way, including the regularity of nature, the
ideas of Euclidean space and absolute time, and others. Indeed, the whole framework of
Newtonian mechanics was included in what Kant thought was hard-wired into the way we
think as human beings! In the description of Kants categories by a modern writer,
....it is they that are the third component in human knowledge.....: they are what there
has necessarily to be in addition to empirical observability and logical consistency
for us to have knowledge of the world around us. They are the forms of all possible
experience. If we think in terms of the metaphor of catching things in the network of

experience, these are the meshes of our nets. Only what can be caught in them is
available to us. Anything that passes through them untouched will not be picked up
by us, and nor will whatever falls outside our nets altogether. Only what these nets
catch will be ours, and only what they can catch can be ours. What they do catch is a
contingent matter, depending on what there is to be caught, but what they can catch is
determined by the nature of the nets themselves, and we live permanently with their
capacities and their limitations.
In Kants view Hume was correct; the lawfulness of nature cannot be proved by appeal
to experience. But this is because it precedes experience. It exists not in Nature but in
us. It is among the innate mental forms that we automatically and inevitably apply in our
experience of nature. Since these forms must characterize all experience, Kant counts them
as human knowledge. If accepted, this counters the scepticism of Hume, but it has a down
side. For knowledge, so understood, can only be of objects as experienced. In Kants
terminology, these are the phenomena, or things-as-they-appear-to-us. They would include
the trees we experience in a walk in the forest as well as (jumping ahead in time a bit) the
electrons we deduce from our experiences in the laboratory. And knowledge of them does
not concern the objects conceived of independently of their being objects of experience, that
is, the noumena, or things-as-they-are-in-themselves. And so a Kantian, though justified in
abandoning the scepticism of Hume, must at the same time reject realism. To a committed
realist, this final consequence of Kants theorizing is shocking, and akin to throwing out the
baby with the bath-water!
Kant was perhaps the pivotal figure in Western philosophy. After Kant it has been
impossible to assume that our understanding of nature is based solely on our ordering
of our experiences in a simple, obvious way that does not require any analysis. And the
general idea that we suffer epistemological limitations intrinsic limitations in our ability
to understand nature continues to this day to influence the way many view the nature
of science and scientific theories. Is it clear that we are capable of discovering the science
necessary to really understand the universe, or even capable of being taught it, assuming
there were someone to teach us?
Nonetheless, no one today is a thoroughgoing Kantian. Certain aspects of Newtonian
mechanics may come naturally to us well, at least after a course or two in school or
university but it is too much to assume that we are hard-wired to think as Newtonians.
Indeed, modern research in physics education indicates that elementary students of physics
bring to the subject a disposition more Aristotelian in its nature than Newtonian. And to
any string theorist it would seem preposterous to accept Euclidean space and absolute time,
however understood, as necessary elements of human knowledge.
Even before Einsteins theory of special relativity abolished the Newtonian concepts of
space and time, modifications to Kants views had been proposed. Particularly interesting
are those of Jules Henri Poincar (1854-1912), the French mathematician, engineer, and
philosopher of science. Conversant with the non-Euclidian geometries developed in the
nineteenth century, and himself deeply involved in the synchronization of spatially separated
clocks for the purpose of more accurate longitude determination, Poincar allowed that
while some notion of space and time is a presupposition of formulating physical laws, which
notion we adopt is a matter of convention. We could change from one type of geometry
to another if that change were accompanied by a corresponding change in the laws we
7

5. Jules Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

advocated. The relevant question is really which geometry leads to the more convenient
formulation of physical laws:
Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric
system is true, and if the old weights and measures are false; if Cartesian co-ordinates
are true and polar co-ordinates are false. One geometry cannot be more true than
another; it can only be move convenient.
This conventionalism of Poincar retains the Kantian necessity of a notion of space and
time, but jettisons the Kantian necessity of a particular notion. Even in the nineteenth
century it appeared that Kant, in his noble effort to join together the philosophy and physics
of his day, had been too bedazzled by Newtonian triumphs when he judged all of Newtonian
physics a necessary presupposition of any further science. And with this arises the doubt
that there is any necessary presupposition. Perhaps we are not as intellectually hard-wired
as Kant thought, or perhaps with enough effort we can at least re-wire ourselves.
1.2

Instrumentalism

The intellectual and social changes following the French Revolution, and the increased
focus on technological development, had a profound impact on nineteenth century views
of the nature of science. Claims that true knowledge of the external world had been
achieved seemed to be overblown, much like the alleged certainty of the earlier political and
economic order. And attempts to prove that such knowledge was certain, in whatever
sense, seemed contrived. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the founder of positivism, argued
that science should move beyond the impossible and ill-founded task of trying to acquire

6. Ernst Mach (1838-1916)

such true knowledge, and towards a new positive phase. The focus should be solely on the
description and prediction of experiences, accomplished by identifying laws of succession
that simply relate one set of experiences to another.
The Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916) continued this tradition,
with a famous suspicion of any metaphysical components of physical theories. He railed
against anything in physics which could not be made accessible to the senses. Not for Mach
the absolute time, for example, postulated by Newton and elevated by Kant. He wrote:
This absolute time can be measured by comparison with no motion; it has therefore
neither a practical nor a scientific value; and no one is justified in saying that he
knows aught about it. It is an idle metaphysical conception.
Mach argued for an analysis of experience into ultimate sensory elements, for example
the shape, weight, and smell of an apple that taken together are what, for Mach, is meant by
apple. Understanding scientific theories as summaries of our sensations, he argued that
the task of a theorist was to make these summaries as economical as possible, free from
unnecessary abstractions. The work of Mach is sometimes linked with that his younger
contemporary Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), who in his 1906 book The Aim and Structure
of Scientific Theories popularized the view that scientific theories should be understood as
instruments for economizing scientific thought. Referring to the organization of phenomena
as "experimental laws," of which Boyles law and Charles law could be taken as examples,
Duhem wrote
A physical theory is not an explanation; it is a system of mathematical propositions
whose aim is to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a whole
group of experimental laws.
Thus successful theories are to be understood as useful and economical instruments for

predicting phenomena, rather than descriptions of the underlying "furniture of the world;"
hence the term instrumentalism. From such an instrumentalist perspective the task of
science is seen as descriptive rather than explanatory. It is argued that it is fruitless to seek
explanations, because all explanations must end somewhere. Postulating unobservable
entities to explain our experiences, such as forces in Newtonian mechanics, is judged
futile. For next the forces themselves must be explained, and so on and so on.
When faced with a scientific theory that posits unobservable entities, properties, or
powers that allegedly explain our experiences, the instrumentalist seeks to reformulate the
theory in order to eliminate reference to such entities, leaving only a prescription for relating
observable phenomena one to another. A beautiful example of this is found in Machs
famous textbook, Science of Mechanics (1883), in which he attempted to eliminate concepts
such as mechanical force and mass from the formulation of Newtonian mechanics, defining
them in terms of accelerations, and thus reducing the science to simply a description of the
motion of sets of particles.
Instrumentalism suffers a blow to its prestige whenever previously unobservable entities,
which instrumentalists had struggled to eliminate from scientific descriptions, become
understood as forming part of our immediate experience. This occurred at the start of
the twentieth century. Both Mach and Duhem had argued that the hitherto unobservable
atoms chemists postulated to understand the way different compounds react should be
eliminated from the discourse of science, which should properly deal only with a description
of chemical reactions unencumbered by such unjustified explanatory baggage. Yet new
experimental and theoretical work of the day convinced many scientists that we are acquiring
direct experience of atoms, or at least something very close to it, as we watch the gyrations
of a Brownian particle under the microscope. In situations like this instrumentalists appear to
many as overcautious and even pedantic, and there is a new enthusiasm for realism. But just
as the instrumentalists prohibition of the use of atoms in scientific descriptions was losing
all its support, the torch of phenomenalism was being passed to a new camp of thinkers.
1.3

Logical positivism and modern phenomenalism

Throughout the nineteenth century, a renewed interest in metaphysics flourished among

philosophers, in large part in response to Kants work. Scholars of various schools debated
each other in their efforts to refine his categories and their organization, to clarify his
concepts of phenomena and noumena, and to extend his philosophy. Others found these
arguments a muddle, and suspected that in the end nothing of substance was being said.
Alleged statements about things-in-themselves and Kantian categories seemed to them as
meaningless as a statement like there is a glubux in the corner would be, if a glubux
had just been introduced as an entity that was alleged to exist but had no observational
consequences.
Some with a scientific perspective sought to distinguish such metaphysical pursuits,
which they deemed idle, from scientific enquiry. Machs strategy had been to eliminate from
theories reference to anything but observable phenomena. However, many were reluctant to
follow this approach because scientific theories positing the existence of some unobservable
entities not glubuxes but, say, electrons had proved extremely successful. The hope
of a new strategy sprung from an analytic tradition in philosophy initiated around the
end of the nineteenth century. Relying on the careful analysis of the uses of language
10

7. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

and logic, it began in earnest with the work of Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) and Bertrand
Russell (1872-1970). Their ambitious program was to build up all of mathematics from the
principles of logic. Ultimately they failed, but their early results impressed many of their
contemporaries. Those friendly to the positivist tradition were both challenged by these new
developments in language and logic, and presented with a new opportunity.
In what by the new standards was vague use of language, early phenomenalists had
referred to our sensations as ideas, and talked about their combination, distinction, and
abstraction as we assemble our picture of the world. The new positivist program had a
linguistic rather than a mental focus. It was hoped that what a realist describes as physical
objects both of the observable type, such as apples, and of the unobservable type, such as
electrons might be shown to be equivalent to a logical construction of primitive statements
about experience, the basic objects of the approach. In a simple example, one of the basic
objects constituting an apple might be a red patch at such-and-such a position in my visual
field at such-and-such a time. The logical constituents of an electron would necessarily be
much more complicated statements of sensations acquired in midst of laboratory equipment.
So instead of a Machian elimination of unobservable entities, those entities would be
reinterpreted as complicated statements about observations, combined rigorously according
to the laws of logic. In such a way statements about even unobservable physical objects
could be made palatable to a positivist.
In recognition of the two principles of which it was composed, this approach was called
logical positivism. It was initiated by the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers trained
primarily as scientists or mathematicians who met regularly between the world wars. After
the Second World War it was pursued most famously at Oxford University, and in the
United States. Although the tradition is a rich one, it is best known for its criterion of
meaningfulness. Automatically considered meaningful were so-called analytic statements,
which are true by linguistic conventions and the meanings of the constituent terms, such

11

as a vixen is a female fox. All statements that are not analytic, such as it is raining
outside, or truth is beauty, are called synthetic. They were deemed meaningful if and
only if they are verifiable. This is the verificationist principle. Primitive statements about
experience the basic objects of the approach are taken as verifiable, and consequently
statements about physical objects logically constructed from them are verifiable as well. If
no observations could ever lead one to accept or reject a non-analytic statement, it is judged
neither true nor false, but meaningless, and thus should be rejected. A logical positivist
would claim that, by the lights of this principle, the statement it is raining outside is a
meaningful statement, be it true or false, while both truth is beauty, and there is a glubux
in the corner, are not.
In large part due to the work of the British philosopher A.J. Ayer (1910-1989),
whose Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) did much to introduce logical positivism to
the English-speaking world, the verificationist principle became for many the defining
feature of logical positivism. If this position is sustained, then statements about glubuxes
and Kantian things-in-themselves, as well as a host of metaphysical claims of nineteenth
century philosophers some of which would have been considered mere speculations by
earlier phenomenalists are deemed meaningless. The hope was that statements that made
reference to the unobservable entities actually useful in science, such as electrons, could in
contrast be shown to be meaningful.
By almost all accounts, the logical positivist program was a failure. For many
scientists and philosophers the most damning catastrophe was the inability to sustain any
meaningfulness criterion. While difficulties from everyday life abound it is hard not to
think of a heartfelt marriage vow "I do" as meaningful, and yet it is certainly not clear how
one would "verify" such a commitment made at the particular time and place of the wedding
we focus on the failures that specifically relate to the scientific enterprise.
A decisive critique was made by Karl Popper (1902-1994), who in The Logic of Scientific
Discovery (1934; English translation 1959) characterized science by noting that statements
we call scientific are in fact those that can be put to experimental test and could possibly be
found false; science is the business of making "risky predictions." Arguing along the lines of
Hume, Popper claimed that while a single experiment might disprove a scientific statement
asserting some law-like regularity, no amount of evidence could ever be accumulated to
verify it beyond any possible doubt. The scientific method involves forming a hypothesis,
deriving its observational consequences, and comparing these to actual observations. If they
do not agree, the hypothesis is falsified. If such a hypothesis passes many tests, it can only
said to be corroborated; ultimate verification is impossible.
Perhaps even more seriously, it was found that statements about the existence of entities
that even have no observable consequence could not be ruled out by the meaningfulness
criterion. For to any statement accepted as scientific, such as " = ," one could
always add a second, apparently "non-scientific" statement in a disjunction, such as to make
" = or there is a glubux in the corner," which can be verified (or corroborated, or
whatever) in simply by verifying (or corroborating, or whatever) " = " So speculative
metaphysics seems to be allowed to creep back in. In an attempt to salvage the project,
the criterion for meaningfulness was modified, this time identifying as meaningless any
theoretical system that contains isolated sentences, that is, sentences whose removal has no
effect on the systems observational consequences. This would rule out including statements

12

8. Karl Popper (1902-1994)

about glubuxes. Likewise disqualified, naturally, was any theory that is logically equivalent
to one containing isolated sentences.
Yet this novel criterion then implies that any scientific theory that introduces nonobservational terms is meaningless, even if those terms are not glubuxes but rather electrons.
For any theory can be decomposed into two parts, the first describing the observable
phenomena without non-observational terms, and the second linking the non-observational
terms to observable phenomena. The second part can be dropped without any effect on the
predictions, so by the novel criterion the entire theory indeed becomes meaningless.
Thus the logical positivists hope of establishing a role for scientifically correct
unobservable physical objects, such as electrons, within a phenomenalist approach seems in
vain. Their program leads inevitably to the view that a scientific theory is only meaningful if
it makes reference solely to observational terms; meaningful theories can provide no more
than a calculus for moving from one set of experiences to another.
And so the project ends where it began, for this view is essentially the instrumentalism
discussed at the end of the previous section. But it was a more tempered phenomenalism
that resulted from this debacle. The difficulties in building up physical objects from basic
objects generally led to an abandonment of attempts to decompose statements about what
we colloquially call observable objects into more primitive ones of any kind. Instead,
some modern phenomenalists tend to assume that statements about such directly observable
objects apples, tables, and oscilloscopes should themselves be taken as primitive
statements, accepted and not subject to further analysis. It is only statements about purported
unobservable entities that they eschew.
1.4

Operationalism

Somewhat in parallel with the rise of logical positivism, a different sort of phenomenalism
also emerged in the 1930s. This view arose as the result of another crisis of certainty that
13

9. Percy Bridgman (1882-1961)

beset the scientific community with the advent of special relativity in 1905. Reservations
such as those of Poincar and Mach notwithstanding, the Newtonian ideas of absolute space
and time had generally been accepted for the two hundred years that had passed since the
birth of modern science. Suddenly these ideas were shown to be not only seriously flawed,
but qualitatively incorrect. How were we caught so off guard? We expect surprises as
we learn more and more, but how can we modify the way we do science so that we will
not be hit with any more surprises about the very basic way we think about things? As
Percy Bridgman (1882-1961) put it, It was perhaps excusable that a revolution in mental
attitude should occur once, because after all physics is a young science, and physicists have
been very busy, but it would certainly be a reproach if such a revolution should ever prove
necessary again.
Bridgman pointed out that previously many concepts in physics, such as space and time,
were defined or at least characterized by their alleged behavior; an example is Newtons
famous phrase Absolute, True, and Mathematical Time, of itself, and from its own nature
flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called Duration.
We then set about trying to investigate such things experimentally. Yet if no such things
exist, we cast ourselves into error and confusion. Bridgman, an experimentalist who won the
Nobel Prize in 1946 for work in physics at high pressures, argued that this is doing things
backwards. Why not define concepts in terms of the experiments? Specifically, Bridgman
suggests that every physical concept should be synonymous with a unique set of physical
operations. In this way, we can be assured that our descriptions of nature will never fail to
correspond to something actual, and as such will not be vulnerable to revision. This view is
known as operationalism.
14

As a toy example, Bridgman considers the concept of the length of a streetcar. A

realist - pre-Einstein! - would assert that this is an attribute of a physical object, the value of
which is independent of whether an observer is moving with respect to the object or not. He
might then consider various ways to measure it. An operationalist, on the other hand, would
begin by considering the kind of operations that could constitute length measurements. If
the streetcar is at rest one might bring up a meter-stick, lay it out with one end at the back of
the streetcar, mark where the other end of the stick lies, translate the stick so that its first end
is now where its other end was, and repeat the process, noting how many times one must do
this to progress to the front of the streetcar.
If the marks were made on the streetcar rather than the ground, such a procedure could
also be carried out if the streetcar were moving slowly, by jumping on it and then carrying
out the operations. If one imagines a streetcar moving very quickly, say at a significant
fraction of the speed of light, such an approach would not be practical. Instead one might
position a large number of graduate students at different points along the streetcar track,
each with a clock. With the clocks previously synchronized in the laboratory, the students
would each note at what time the front and then the back of the streetcar passes them. To
determine the length of the moving streetcar at a particular time , the professor then asks
which student noted the front end of the car at that time and which the back. The distance
between these observers, determined by the first method of laying out the meter-stick, is
then taken to be the length of the moving streetcar at time .
Thus, there can be a number of different lengths, depending on the identified
procedures; in the example above for a moving streetcar we have the jumping-on-thestreetcar length and the graduate-student-intensive length. The situation would be
similar for other concepts, such as time, temperature, and energy. In limiting cases, one
might expect the different procedures associated with a given nominal concept to yield the
same result. However, as investigations into new regimes were made, differences might
be observed. No measurements would be wrong, however, because in each case the
identified procedure had been noted and followed. The consequence would simply be that
it might be best to abandon one or many procedures, or keep them all but realize they now
are associated with concepts that should be thought of as different. In any case, a tabulation
of the procedures used and the results obtained would stand the test of time; it would only
be their incorporation into theory that might change. It is precisely this discrimination of
concepts that Bridgman takes to be the critical methodological innovation in Einsteins
introduction of special relativity.
Most of the criticisms of this approach focus on the assumption that every distinct
set of operations is associated with a unique concept. This assumption implies that two
measurement procedures differing in even the slightest detail must, strictly speaking, be
associated with different concepts. Bridgman would argue, for example, that the account of
the measurement of the length of a stationary streetcar provided above must in principle be
supplemented with every minute detail of the operations involved, including, for instance,
all the details by which the rod is moved from one position to the next on the object its
precise path through space and its velocity and acceleration in getting from one position to
another. Since every actual sequence of physical operations is distinct from every other - if
in no other respect than the history leading up to the actual experiment, including even what
the experimentalist had for breakfast! - it would appear that, strictly speaking, no concept

15

is applicable to more than a single experiment. Adopting this view cannot therefore lead
to a simplified or economical account of our experiences. But, critics argue, this is one of
the goals of a proper scientific theory. By ruling out the possibility of making unjustified
generalizations, Bridgman secures freedom from revolutionary changes in concepts, but
in so doing he sacrifices the possibility of any simple description of the phenomena under
investigation.
In practice, self-avowed operationalists inevitably define concepts in terms of procedures,
the details of which are not completely specified, and thus find themselves giving up
absolute certainty and risking the possibility of conceptual change. Their best strategy, in
light of practical limitations, is to associate two procedures with the same concept whenever
the differences in the procedures do not appear to lead to any differences in the results of
the experiment, and always to remember that such practices may lead to errors in the future
which can be overcome only by specifying the details of the operations more carefully.

2 Pragmatism
We now leave phenomenalism and turn to a different view on the nature of scientific
theories, that of the pragmatists. The birth of pragmatism follows the nineteenth century, a
period in history when technological advances seemed to race ahead faster than ever. Despite
the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, developments in manufacturing, transportation,
and communication, relying on advances in chemistry and physics, led to vast improvements
in the lives of people of all classes living in the North Atlantic countries. The new
technologies seemed to proclaim the significance and success of the practice of science,
and perhaps nowhere more loudly than in the United States, where in the aftermath of the
American Civil War (1860-1865) many saw the pre-war moral and philosophical thinking,
with its firm beliefs and unshakeable commitments on both sides, as responsible for the
carnage. It was natural for some to suggest that such thinking should be abandoned, and
instead the practice of science be taken as the very model of a successful enterprise, a model
that other disciplines such as philosophy might do well to emulate.
However important theory-formation may be to the practice of science, there is no doubt
that science also involves testing hypotheses through experimental investigation, modifying
theoretical constructs in the light of the results, and applying the results to technological
goals. Instead of being an armchair philosopher who tries to reason through what is
correct, one has to roll up ones sleeves, muck about, make mistakes, set things right, and
eventually come up with something useful. Action and experience seem to characterize the
enterprise. At the end of the nineteenth century the American pragmatists (from the Greek
pragma, meaning action) claimed to describe how ideas and theories are actually used in the
practice of science, and from that built a model for intellectual inquiry in general.
C.P. Peirce (1839-1914) introduced pragmatism in an 1878 essay in Popular Science
Monthly, and John Dewey (1859-1952) developed a full philosophy that emphasized
the importance of experience in evaluating concepts and actions. But perhaps the most
effective advocate of pragmatism was William James (1842-1910). Enthusiastic, indeed
almost evangelical in his essays and speeches, James wrote that ideas (which themselves
are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into
satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience, to the extent that they will carry
16

10. William James (1842-1910)

us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things
satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor. In the same manner, theories
are identified as instruments for moving from one set of experiences to another. The
abstract elements of a scientific theory do not really refer to physical objects or deal with the
phenomena we observe, but they serve as tools in relating one set of experiences to another.
Pragmatism escapes phenomenalisms often problematic dichotomy between observable
and unobservable. Here is an example due to Peirce, introduced in a critique of Auguste
Comtes work. A strict phenomenalist must think of his neighbors dog in a totally different
way than he thinks of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Phenomena associated with the first, the dogs
size, smell, the texture of its coat, that would even define the dog for Mach, are readily
observable. Tyrannosaurus rex, on the other hand, can only be part of a formalism to help
describe and systematize the so-called fossil record; it is only these rocks and bones that
our senses access. It is the fossil record and the dog that are on the same level for the
phenomenalist, while Tyrannosaurus rex is only an abstraction. Yet, in the very biology that
is used to describe both dog and dinosaur, they are treated as very similar creatures. Within
a pragmatist view, dogs and dinosaurs stand at the same level. Theories and ideas about
them are useful to the extent that they help us deal with our experiences, whether those
experiences are of the barking animal next door or of the fossil record. Such comments are
of course not particular to the example of Tyrannosaurus rex; for a pragmatist black holes,
genes, electrons, quarks, and the like are all concepts at the same level as the barking animal
next door.
Another respect in which pragmatists differ from most phenomenalists is that the
introduction of new theoretical elements that go beyond relating different phenomena is not

17

frowned upon; indeed, it is encouraged if overall it makes the theory a better instrument
for predicting and controlling the world around us. The goal is not necessarily economy
of description, but efficiency in the use of the theory in a practical sense. Moreover, the
certainty often prized by phenomenalists, gained through restricting themselves to dealing
with phenomena, is not valued here. It is accepted that ...most, perhaps all, of our laws are
only approximations. ... They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as
some one calls them, in which we write our reports of nature...
The pragmatist also rejects the view that scientific theories provide a true description of
actual physical entities. For instance, in his 1907 essay entitled What Pragmatism Means,
James quotes a speech by Professor W.S. Franklin (1863-1930),
I think that the sickliest notion of physics, even if a student gets it, is that it is the
science of masses, molecules, and the ether. And I think that the healthiest notion,
even if a student does not wholly get it, is that physics is the science of the ways of
taking hold of bodies and pushing them!
Richard Rorty (1931-2007), a modern-day proponent of pragmatism, expands on this
with perhaps less drama but more clarity:
[The pragmatist] drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether,
and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it
just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years
of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of correspondence
(either of thoughts to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral
of this discouraging history to be that true sentences work because they correspond
to the way things are is no more illuminating than it is right because it fulfills
the Moral Law. Both remarks, in the pragmatists eyes, are empty metaphysical
compliments harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or
agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and clarified philosophically.
Pragmatists focus on the realm of practical activity has consequences for how one
understands the progress of science. For at least a typical realist, progress consists of
identifying physical objects and their attributes more precisely, and for a phenomenalist in
connecting an increasingly wide range of experiences in a description that is increasingly
economical. Both would naturally expect some sort of convergence as scientific theories
improved. Conversely, for a pragmatist, who identifies a successful theory as one that aids in
the prediction and control of our experiences, it is easy to imagine that a set of theoretical
concepts could prove useful for some time, but then be abandoned entirely for a new set of
concepts. Already in 1917, John Dewey had written:
Intellectual advance occurs in two ways. At times increase of knowledge is organized
about old conceptions, while these are expanded, elaborated and refined, but not
seriously revised, much less abandoned. At other times, the increase of knowledge
demands qualitative rather than quantitative change; alteration, not addition. Mens
minds grow cold to their former intellectual concerns; ideas that were burning fade;
interests that were urgent seem remote. Men face in another direction; their older
perplexities are unreal; considerations passed over as negligible loom up. Former

18

11. Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

problems may not have been solved, but they no longer press for solution.
Nearly a half-century later Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) advocated a like-minded thesis
in his study of scientific progress, arguing that even if particular scientists thought of
themselves as realists or phenomenalists, in practice the community of scientists behaved as
pragmatists, as a tribe of puzzle-solvers. In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962),
he argued that while most of the time science progresses by adding to and modifying an
existing paradigm, or coherent tradition of scientific research, now and again there is a
revolution, or paradigm shift, in the underlying models and assumptions that form the basis
for research. Examples include the move from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican framework,
the abandonment of the phlogiston theory of heat as a fluid, and the demise of absolute space
and time with the advent of special relativity.
Kuhn rejected the realist view that scientific progress was a process of ever more accurate
descriptions of the world. Certainly, he admitted that ...scientific development is, like
biological, a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than
earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are
applied. But since the theories are only tools, no sort of convergence in the paradigms need
appear. Criticizing the idea of any such convergence, Kuhn wrote:
.... as a historian, I am impressed with the implausibility of the view. I do not doubt,
for example, that Newtons mechanics improves on Aristotles and that Einsteins
improves on Newtons as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their
succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in
some important respects, though by no means in all, Einsteins general theory of
relativity is closer to Aristotles than either of them is to Newtons.
Even more radical critics argue that scientists fashion their theories to be useful
tools not only with respect to their technological experiences, but as well to help them
19

12. Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996)

manoeuver successfully in their experiences in the larger society, where they partake in the
general ideological beliefs of their times. These cognitive relativists see alleged scientific
knowledge as comparable to the mythology of other cultures, as simply our myths based
on our assumptions. In the view of these critics, we should not be surprised to find our
theoretical descriptions, nominally of nature, to be riddled with cultural, racial, and gender
presuppositions.

3 Realism
Perhaps the most common view of the nature of scientific theories is that they should
be attempts to offer a description of the world independent of our conception of it, and to
explain our experiences in terms of this description. This view is called realism. It asserts
that the abstract elements in a proper scientific theory refer to the physical objects and their
evolving properties, entities which exist independently of our observing them. It is probably
the most congenial view of physical theories to physicists. And certainly there is no doubt
that at least most beginning students of physics think the point of the enterprise is simply to
identify what is really there.
The case that a realist approach is at least desirable can be easily made. In the
marketplace, a colleague and I typically find ourselves in agreement concerning the
color, texture, and shape of an apple before us. This inter-subjectivity holds even in
the more complicated environment of a scientific laboratory. While my colleague and I
may disagree strongly with respect to politics, religion, and how to raise our children, we
typically agree on the description of laboratory equipment, and the results of an experiment
as indicated by cloud chambers, pointers, or digital readouts. This particular kind of
20

unanimity is so commonplace that it is usually taken for granted. Yet it is the central
role that intersubjectivity plays in that natural sciences that distinguishes them from other
areas of human inquiry and creativity. Realists argue that such intersubjectivity is only
understandable if there are public physical objects that are responsible for the very private
sensations about which we nonetheless all agree. And then should it not be the business
of science to seek out the description of those physical objects, rather than just producing
a catalog of our experiences as do the phenomenalists, or developing newer and newer
technologies as do the pragmatists?
3.1

Unobservable physical objects

Because of their focus on physical objects, realists often find pragmatists and phenomenalists,
who disparage any discussion of such objects as the realist understands them, allied against
them as anti-realists. Realists take strong exception to the phenomenalists, who following
the debacle of logical positivism withdrew to the position that claims of knowledge
can be nothing more than claims about directly observable objects. Realists assert
that the phenomenalist cannot draw a meaningful distinction between observable and
unobservable entities. They cite the continuum of cases that can be found between what the
phenomenalists grant as observable and what they affirm to be unobservable. A famous
example is the continuum of magnifications with which we can view the world; we can look
at an object directly, or through a magnifying glass, or through a low-power microscope, or
through a high-power microscope, etc. Are microscopic paramecia to be allowed to play a
role in the description of only our experiences with a microscope, and suddenly to be denied
any status when we stop using the instrument? The anti-realists abhorrence of (at least at
present) unobservable physical objects seems perverse.
In what might at first sight seem surprising, modern instrumentalists do not all avoid
talk of unobservable physical objects. Consider a scientific theory that accounts for our
observations in some realm of experience; such a theory is called empirically adequate in
that realm, from the Greek empeiria, meaning experience. If it contains statements about
unobservable entities, the philosopher Bass van Fraassen (1941-...) argues that we should
not try to translate these statements into observation language, as the logical positivists tried,
but that we should take them on face value for what they say, that they should be "literally
construed." Following the collapse of logical positivism, it indeed seems that this is really
the only way to make sense of them. Yet he is not advocating realism. We can accept the
theory, and we can talk about it and its unobservable entities just as a realist would, but
we need not believe its claims concerning unobservable entities. Van Fraassen calls his
view constructive empiricism, explaining "I use the adjective constructive to indicate my
view that scientific activity is one of construction rather than discovery: constructions of
models that must be adequate to the phenomena, and not discovery of truth concerning the
unobservable." So as a "user" of the theory one takes its models and its claims seriously,
one "literally construes them," in the sense that one uses them when thinking about new
problems. Indeed, it is the literal construal of the claims of a theory by a practitioner, the
thinking in terms of those claims, that often leads to a theory being so useful in practice. But
at the end of the day Van Fraasen would deny that we have any reason to believe that any
such claims about unobservable entities are true. At the end of the day the theory is just an
instrument.
21

Red-blooded realists find this too soft a position. They acknowledge that at no stage do
we have perfect or complete knowledge about physical objects and their attributes, but that
scientific theories at least aim at a true association of abstract elements with physical objects
and their attributes, and provide successively better approximations to the truth over time. It
is in response to claims such as these that modern anti-realists sharpen their knives.
3.2

Attacks and defenses

Some attack realism with the assertion that experimental evidence underdetermines
theory. More than one theory, these attackers claim, can be constructed to describe any
set of experimental evidence, and thus none of them can be accepted as identifying true
physical objects or their attributes. Of course, this is not a problem for realists if the
underdetermination is only an occasional occurrence and is removed by the accumulation
of additional evidence. However, some anti-realists argue that underdetermination is
ubiquitous, that empirically equivalent competitors can be found for all theories. Duhem
pointed out that all observation in necessarily theory-laden. Even the observation of the new
planet Neptune following its prediction Newtonian physics, which seemed to be a striking
confirmation of the theory, itself presupposed a particular theory of how telescopes work.
The philosopher Williard van Orman Quine (1908-2000) extended this argument, pointing
out that multiple assumptions of different types, logical, metaphysical, and mathematical,
are involved. In the Neptune example, the assumption of classical logic, the appropriate
of Euclidean space, and the like could also be listed. The so-called Quine-Duhem thesis
asserts that no particular statement in a theory can be tested, let alone verified or falsified,
and only the entire theory can be examined as a whole. In this situation, it would seem one
could construct elaborate if dubious theoretical structures that could also explain any set of
phenomena in a framework very different from the theory being advocated.
One realist response is to reject this claim outright, by an appeal to history or experience.
Here is Albert Einstein (1879-1955), in a 1918 address to the Berlin Academy of Sciences:
....the supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at ... universal elementary laws from
which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to
these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can
reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were
any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally justified; and this
opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown
that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has
always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone
deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely
determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge
between phenomena and their theoretical principles.
But even if this is granted at any given moment, in Einsteins words, a stronger take on
this argument against realism comes from the pragmatist camp. The idea of realist scientific
theories getting closer and closer to an alleged true description of physical objects and
their attributes implies their convergence. We have already mentioned Kuhns doubts
about the convergence of scientific theories from a historians point of view. To these he
adds doubts from the perspective of philosophy of language, arguing that the meaning of
22

individual terms in a scientific theory are fixed by the entire body of scientific statements
that make up the theory. Consider the term electricity, for example, which appears in
the electromagnetic theory of Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), in the late nineteenth century
theory of H.A. Lorentz (1853-1928), and in the quantum electrodynamics of the 1940s.
While the same term appears in all three theories, Kuhn would argue that huge paradigmatic
shifts in models and assumptions occurred at the interfaces of the theories; in the first
electricity appears as a fluid, in the second as a set of classical particles, and in the third
as a quantum field. The theories before and after a paradigmatic shift are incommensurable,
Kuhn claims, which is to say that ideas from one theory may not be expressible in the
language of the other. Thus the very reference of a scientific term is theory dependent. As
well, at least in modern scientific theories the truth of any statement in a scientific theory is
theory dependent, for it is only using the whole theory in the analysis of a generally very
complicated experiment that any particular experimental test of a statement can be analyzed.
As Kuhn emphasized,
One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more
and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the
puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its
ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates
nature and what is really there.
Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of truth for application
to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent
way to reconstruct phrases like really there; the notion of a match between the
ontology of a theory and its real counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in
principle.
In brief, the pragmatist claims that the notions of reference and truth, insofar as they
make any sense, are theory dependent, and since scientific theories undergo revolutionary
changes, there is no constancy of reference or standards of truth in science. If this is indeed
the manner in which science progresses, then it calls into question the assumption that the
abstract elements of scientific theories can refer to physical entities. For if the meanings
of the terms in our scientific theories change over time, in a manner that is not simply an
increase in precision or specificity, then there is no convergence in ontology, and therefore
no reason to believe that there exist unobservable entities with specific attributes of which
successive theories are providing better and better descriptions.
Kuhns model of scientific advance is an ongoing topic of debate among historians
and philosophers of science, and many today doubt the intellectually cataclysmic nature
of the paradigmatic shifts on which Kuhn focussed. Indeed, some modern scholarship
emphasizes the importance of dialogue between opposing camps during rapid scientific
change. Nonetheless, it is clear that the realist position would be strengthened by defense
of a transtheoretic conception of reference and truth, an account of how the reference and
truth of scientific statements could be understood to be independent of the theory of the day.
Hilary Putnam (1926-...) provided such an account, which is sometimes called the causal
theory of reference.
According to Putnam, what users of a scientific term, such as electricity, have in
common before and after a revolutionary change in theory is that each of them is connected

23

13. Hilary Putnam (1926- )

by a certain kind of causal chain to a situation in which a description of electricity is
given, and generally a causal description that is, one which singles out electricity as
the physical magnitude responsible for certain effects in a certain way. Thus the term
electricity is introduced into an individuals scientific vocabulary either by witnessing the
first introduction of the term, or by learning from someone who witnessed the introduction,
or by learning from someone linked by a chain of causal transmissions to the introduction.
The referent of the term is fixed through this causal chain; it is not fixed by the users beliefs.
So while the user may have numerous mistaken beliefs about the nature of electricity, these
will be beliefs about electricity and not about some non-existent entity.
Realists admit that this account of reference may not be completely accurate, but
maintain that it provides a convincing demonstration that a transtheoretic notion of reference
is possible. What is typically seen as more difficult is to justify a transtheoretic notion
of truth. How could one defend, without even the use of a theory itself to describe
experimental results, the claim that statements linking abstract elements in the theory with
alleged unobservable entities are at least approximately true? One bold argument is that the
pragmatic success or usefulness of science is only understandable under the assumption that
scientific theories are approximately true. Usefulness and success are taken to be evidence
of approximate truth. Putnam puts it this way: The positive argument for realism is that it is
the only philosophy that doesnt make the success of science a miracle. After all, our mature
scientific theories are extraordinarily successful in both describing known phenomena
and predicting new ones. Would not this be a ridiculously remarkable coincidence if the
unobservable entities to which they ascribe existence did not in fact exist, or were at least
good approximations of what exists?
Anti-realist criticisms of this so-called "Miracle argument" abound, including the
Quine-Duhem thesis itself. But perhaps the most telling objection is one that challenges
24

realists on their own ground by questioning the plausibility of the thesis of realism by the
same stringent criteria as one would test the plausibility of any other scientific hypothesis.
Larry Laudan states the challenge as follows:
Before a realist accepts a scientific hypothesis, he generally wants to know whether
it has explained or predicted more than it was devised to explain, whether it has
been subjected to a battery of controlled tests, whether it has successfully made
novel predictions, and whether there is independent evidence for it. ... Even if
we grant ... that realism entails and thus explains the success of science, ought
that ... success warrant ... the acceptance of realism? Since realism was devised
to explain the success of science, it remains purely ad hoc with respect to that
success. ... No proponent of realism has sought to show that realism satisfies those
stringent empirical demands which the realist himself minimally insists on when
appraising scientific theories. The latter-day realist often calls realism a scientific
or well-tested hypothesis but seems curiously reluctant to subject it to those
controls he otherwise takes to be a sine qua non for empirical well-foundedness.
3.3

Beyond metaphysical realism

Acknowledging the force of arguments such as these, nowadays many realists are willing
to give up the traditional version of realism called metaphysical realism by Hilary
Putnam which posits an external world that our scientific theories describe in increasingly
improved approximations by means of correspondence relations linking abstract elements
in the theory to what actually exists in the world. They admit that any kind of rigorous
confirmation of such an alleged correspondence cannot be provided. Such a stance is not
new within the community of physicists. Einstein and Infeld, writing in 1938, discuss how
the construction of a physical theory is similar to trying to figure out how a closed watch
works, and they say of the scientist:
If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be
responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is
the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare
his picture with the real mechanism, and he cannot even imagine the possibility or
the meaning of such a comparison.
The last line emphasizes the futility of any direct comparison of abstract elements in a
theory with elements of the world as it actually is. But if this is conceded, the link between
the bottom and top halves of Fig. 1 seems to be broken; the physical objects that form the
basis of a realists discussion now seem unlinked from the world. What is their point? What
is left of realism?
In one period of his later writings, Hilary Putnam argues for what he calls an internal
realism, in which elements of a theory are identified with elements of the external world,
but where this correspondence is posited and accepted only within the context of positing
and accepting the theory, and not more generally. There is a strong link here with Kant
and Kuhn, and some connection with constructive empiricism. Trees and electrons exists
"for us" as we use and think in terms of the theory; neither theory nor observation are

25

independent from us. The emphasis here is on an understanding of the phenomena that
such a realist description provides. Of course, this strength of the realist position has been
appreciated for some time. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bertrand
Russell emphasized how a simplicity in understanding phenomena arises naturally from
.....the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us,
whose action on us causes our sensations.
The way in which simplicity comes in from supposing that there really are
physical objects is easily seen. If the cat appears at one moment in one part of the
room, and at another in another part, it is natural to suppose that it has moved from
the one to the other, passing over a series of intermediate positions. But if it is
merely a set of sense-data, it cannot have ever been in any place where I did not see
it; thus we shall have to suppose that it did not exist at all while I was not looking,
but suddenly sprang into being in a new place. If the cat exists whether I see it or
not, we can understand from our own experience how it gets hungry between one
meal and the next; but if it does not exist when I am not seeing it, it seems odd that
appetite should grow during non-existence as fast as during existence. And if the cat
consists only of sense-data, it cannot be hungry, since no hunger but my own can be
a sense-datum to me. Thus the behaviour of the sense-data which represent the cat to
me, though it seems quite natural when regarded as an expression of hunger, becomes
utterly inexplicable when regarded as mere movements and changes of patches of
colour, which are as incapable of hunger as a triangle is of playing football.
As theories improve, the kind of understanding we can achieve from them becomes more
detailed and far-ranging. If truth has any meaning within this kind of framework, it is as a
kind of convergence to a generally accepted understanding that occurs as a science becomes
more and more mature. A strong pragmatic component can be identified here, and indeed
internal realism can be thought of as realism and pragmatism shaking hands.
A different realist stance, which also abandons metaphysical realism, has been called
motivational realism by Arthur Fine (1937- ...), and attributed by him to the later Einstein.
Here realism is taken not so much as a philosophical insistence on a type of scientific theory,
but rather as a program for research, a commitment to try to construct scientific theories of
the particular realist type. Einstein often emphasized the many successes of this program,
from Newtonian mechanics to the early years of the twentieth century. Necessarily these
theories had to be empirically adequate to gain acceptance. Indeed, Einstein himself would
often entheorize, a term used to indicate the strategy of dealing with a question about the
truth of a particular scientific statement by substituting for it the question of whether the
theory in which the statement resides is viable. In such a way any requirement of having
to actually prove the truth of a scientific statement about an alleged unobservable entity
is avoided, and the burden of establishing truth is converted to the much easier one of
establishing empirical adequacy. Yet Einstein felt that a simple positivist ideal of providing
a catalog of phenomena would not be able to drive scientific research. In an address at
Columbia University in 1934, he said
I do not believe, however, that so elementary an ideal could do much to kindle the
investigators passion from which really great achievements have arisen. Behind the
tireless efforts of the investigator there lurks a stronger, more mysterious drive: it is
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14. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

existence and reality that one wishes to comprehend.
Einstein immediately admits,
...one soon gets into difficulties when one has to explain what is really meant by
reality and by comprehend in such a general statement.
But nonetheless the motivation that the program provides argues for its acceptance. Since
it is the realist program of research that is advocated, and no kind of eventual convergence
to any alleged truth is asserted, there is no challenge from paradigm shifts that might
suddenly change the very nature of unobservable entities that are being posited. Such a shift
does not weaken the motivational drive the program provides.
Clearly a component of pragmatism is present here too, as well as a strong component of
psychology. Perhaps motivational realism could be characterized as realism and psychology
shaking hands.

4 The trauma of quantum mechanics

A commitment to one of realism, phenomenalism, or pragmatism, or to one of their
brands, commits one to a category of interpretations of a physical theory, to the kinds of
things to which the abstract elements in that theory refer. Classical mechanics developed
historically within a realist framework. Although anti-realist views were adopted by some
classical physicists who were concerned at a deep level with the rigor or usefulness of their
descriptions, the dominant realism was rarely questioned because, by and large, it had been
useful to physicists and had not led to any significant difficulties.
After quantum effects were discovered, physicists could never be so secure in their view
of what their science was about. Suddenly the kind of issues raised in this chapter were thrust

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upon the research community, as we will see later in this book. Realism seemed difficult
to sustain; indeed, some even claimed it was shown experimentally to be a fundamentally
flawed way of understanding the nature of scientific theories, that the abstract entities of
quantum mechanics could not be interpreted as describing the attributes of unobservable
entities that were supposed to actually exist in an external world. Other views some new
and some old came up for consideration and reconsideration. A nice example is provided
by the listing in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy for instrumentalism,
instrumentalism, in its most common meaning, a kind of anti-realistic view of
scientific theories wherein theories are construed as...instruments... The view was
fashionable...but then faded; it was recently revived, in large measure owing to the
genuinely perplexing character of quantum theories in physics.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the kind of concerns raised in this chapter are
now linked with experimental results in a way that could never have been foreseen at the
start of the twentieth century. Experiment seems to indicate that philosophy, which was
largely banished from the world of science after the triumph of classical mechanics, must be
allowed back into the laboratory. At least that is one way of understanding the intellectual
turmoil that surrounds discussions of the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Despite common claims to the contrary, the assertion that a realist quantum mechanics
is impossible is simply wrong. Yet, as we shall see, the unobservable entities that various
realist interpretations of quantum mechanics postulate seem to many to resemble the
maligned glubuxes we discussed earlier, with no observable consequences. This snatches
from realist physicists what they often see as their best practical defense against attacks on
realism, the argument that at least a realist viewpoint is the simplest way of accounting for
the facts. Russells arguments may hold well for his cat, but many would argue that the
purported behavior of particles in a realist quantum mechanics is such that it is far simpler
to assume that they dont exist at least when they are not being observed rather than to
assume that they do! In such a situation, can the program of realism any longer even provide
the motivation that was so important to Einstein?
A committed realist perseveres, perhaps hoping for the reappearance of simplicity as
physics advances, and in any case noting that it is not necessary that the microscopic world
be simple in a way that we expect based on our experience of the macroscopic world. But
there are other options.
One can simply ignore interpretational issues, and proceed with applying the formalism
and rules of quantum mechanics. This is the so-called shut up and calculate school.
Its members who have an interest in interpretational issues believe that the best way to
ultimately address these problems is simply through the development and extension of the
formalism of quantum mechanics, and its application to new domains. For with such further
work they believe the extended formalism and practice will ultimately yield up as natural the
correct interpretation. The early Heisenberg was an advocate of such an approach.
If one is not possessed by such a pious hope, one can embrace pragmatism, where there
is no concern about the reference of the abstract elements. One can even adopt a kind of
pragmatism writ large, where one entertains and encourages discussions of any and all
possible interpretations. Such discussions may help science advance, in that they suggest
different interesting experiments and help in bringing some understanding to different

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15. Arthur Fine (1937 - )

phenomena, which can then lead to their manipulation. This kind of grand pragmatism
views not only the formalism and practice of theories, but their interpretations as well, as
merely tools for advancing our ability to predict and control the world. It is an approach
taken by many working physicists. Their colleagues who are instead committed to a
particular category of interpretations consider them not as adversaries, but rather as having
withdrawn from the field of battle.
A more radical view is the natural ontological attitude (NOA) of Arthur Fine. The
quickest way to get a feel for NOA, he writes, is to understand it as undoing the idea of
interpretation... Fine believes that science should be taken on its own terms, as a human
activity, and interpretational work is an unfounded attempt to read something into it. He is
equally critical of both realism and antirealism:
What binds realism and antirealism together is this. They see science as a set of
practices in need of an interpretation, and they see themselves as providing just the
right interpretation.
But science is not needy in this way. Its history and current practice constitute
a rich and meaningful setting. In that setting questions of goals or aims or purposes
occur spontaneously and locally. For what purpose is a particular instrument being
used, or why use a tungsten filament here rather than a copper one? What significant
goals would be accomplished by building accelerators capable of generating energy
levels in excess of 104 GeV? Why can we ignore gravitational effects in the analysis
of Compton scattering? Etc.
These kinds of questions he feels can be answered within the usual framework of
scientific discussion. But Fine considers questions like what is the aim of science?
analogous to the question what is the purpose of life? He writes:
As we grow up, I think we learn that such questions really do not require an
answer, but rather they call for an empathetic analysis to get at the cognitive (and
tempermental) sources of the question, and then a program of therapy to help change
all that.
The sense here seems to be that a scientific theory should be properly understood as
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nothing more than its formalism and practice, and that those seeking an interpretation
are just in need of some sort of psychological counselling. Yet many would argue that
interpretations, even if unstated, are inevitably lurking beneath any discussion of the practice
of a scientific theory, and perhaps even its formalism. And many would claim that, despite
the soothing of any counsellor, most quantum physicists who get up from their desks and
move into their laboratories to perform experiments will persist in having some view of just
what it is that is described by the abstract elements in their calculations.
Operationalism offers perhaps the most conservative approach, focused as it is only on
operations in the laboratory and the results that are recorded on laboratory gadgets. This
is often the approach favoured by those working on problems in quantum computing and
quantum information theory, for it allows them to get on with their work without constantly
stumbling over interpretational issues. For some this is only a temporary stance; they
argue that in the future it may be possible to give a satisfactory realist interpretation of
quantum mechanics, but as matters stand at the moment the only reasonable interpretation
possible is an operational one. For others it is a more permanent commitment. No talk of
underlying unobservable entities appears in this approach, but there is also no talk of sunsets
or supernovas. Such phenomena would only appear very indirectly as readings on various
laboratory gadgets that we could only colloquially say are triggered by their radiation.
There can be no direct talk of the birth or evolution of the universe, for these cannot be
defined in terms of operations in the laboratory. Such concepts could only appear very
indirectly through the laws of physics that affect laboratory operations and their results.
Many physicists recoil from a science that cannot directly address cosmology, and that
would allow sunsets and supernovas only the kind of ghost-like appearance they make in
operationalism. Some of these repair to versions of phenomenalism that indeed concentrate
on the phenomena themselves, where at least the sunsets we observe regain their full
glory. But the price is that a dichotomy between the observable and unobservable must be
established and justified. The finiteness of ~ gives some hope that this might be possible in
quantum mechanics in a way that could not be possible in classical mechanics. But even if
this can be accomplished, one is left with a science only of our experiences, and the puzzling
fact of intersubjectivity. Surely, many feel, there must be something really there. Will it
always remain hidden behind a Kantian veil?
In the following chapters we examine these options in detail.

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