Naturalistic Quietism or Scientific Realism?

Abstract

Scientific realism and scientific antirealism each have their defenders, their well-worn arguments, and their favorite examples from the history of science. Besides these vocally defended positions, there are those philosophers who would prefer to abstain from such debates altogether: the quietists. Quietism is a position taken with respect to realism/antirealism debates in other areas of philosophy as well, but I suggest that in the philosophy of science, quietism takes a peculiar form; it is naturalistic quietism. The most explicit defense of such a view has of course been Arthur Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude, but I would also count Penelope Maddy’s Second Philosophy as a form of naturalistic quietism. In my paper I ask whether naturalistic quietism is philosophically defensible, or whether it collapses into scientific realism. It is natural to suggest the latter, since the naturalistic quietist appears to help herself to all the beliefs a scientific realist might want to hold, but without willingness to defend those against antirealist challenges. So naturalistic quietism might seem like a lazy or question begging form of scientific realism. I first clarify the way in which naturalistic quietism differs from other forms of quietism, in particular from quietism about metaphysics. Quietism about debates in metaphysics is usually driven by semantic or meta-semantic considerations: certain questions are suspected of being meaningless, or debates of being merely verbal. Naturalistic quietism, by contrast, is epistemic rather than semantic: questions about the existence of particular entities posited by scientific theories are not meaningless, and the disputes are not verbal. The idea behind naturalistic quietism is instead that epistemic challenges to such claims are best put forward and responded to within scientific discourse itself; attempts at epistemic challenges from outside scientific discourse have no real traction. I then show that antirealism in the philosophy of science is especially susceptible to the naturalistic challenge, because in its currently most plausible form, antirealism about science is an epistemic challenge to science, not a semantic or ontological one. That means antirealism about science brings a challenge to science precisely from the direction naturalists claim cannot be taken. Can quietist hold that position without begging the question? In the final part of the paper I argue that naturalism does not presuppose scientific realism, and show how naturalistic quietism avoids, rather than answers, the challenge of antirealism about science. Scientific realists are committed to the idea that science discovers the truth, and accordingly are trying to meet the epistemic challenge of antirealism head-on, most directly in the form of the No Miracles Argument, which commits them to an inference from success to truth, which in turn is open to (further) skeptical challenges. The naturalistic quietist’s response to the antirealist challenge is more oblique. Instead of arguing that the success of science requires that we take science on the whole to be true, naturalists only need to claim that the success of science suggests that science, for all its flaws, is a better method of inquiry than others. This peculiar line of response is possible in the case of quietism concerning realism and antirealism debates about science, but not about other discourses, because the antirealist challenge to science is currently purely epistemic, and yet science enjoys the highest epistemic regard.