I'm not a philosopher, but I have some thoughts about some issues, and I'd like to know what you think about them.
MrSamsa once claimed here that "science doesn't attempt to describe reality". I was not convinced by this non-realist stance, I think it's more reasonable to hold that at least one of the reasonable goals of science and scientists is to "describe reality", if "reality" is understood in its more usual sense (not a metaphysical sense that would make it completely unreachable for human beings, but the ordinary and "deflationary" sense that would allow us to distinguish between real and not-real things, e.g. between platypuses and unicorns). For example, before describing the platypus, George Shaw (the first European to study this animal) believed it to be a hoax made up of various other creatures. It seems reasonable to say that George Shaw was trying to "describe reality" when he asked if the animal was real or just a hoax. I think that it's also reasonable to say that many scientific concepts are adopted as "useful tools" or as "models with empirical adecuacy" without any commitment about their real existence, but this doesn't imply that it's reasonable to generalize this instrumentalist/agnostic stance to the whole set of scientific concepts.
Regarding ontology, I think that it also could be understood in a "deflationary" way as a by-product of science, a taxonomy of what exists according to a given theory and its proponents. From this perspective, ontology is not an a-priori and atemporal catalogue of the ultimate components of reality, but a specification of the different stances that a community of humans in a certain place and time can assume towards some concepts, which can fall in a continuum from "assumed to be real" to "assumed to be not-real" with intermediate levels of reliance and agnosticism between the extremes.
My questions are: (1) is it reasonable to adopt something like this "deflationary" stance about realism and ontology? (2) If the answer is positive, which philosophers or scientists have adopted this kind of stance about realism and ontology?

Imagine in the Louvre there is a performance artist standing next to the Mona Lisa, dressed up as Mona Lisa and holding a frame in front of her.

The performance artist is a real woman but she is not the real Mona Lisa.

On the other hand the painting is the real "Mona Lisa" but not a real woman (if we use "Mona Lisa" to refer to the famous painting).

So each is real in one sense and not real in another sense. That is the problem with the term - anything could be termed real in some way.

For example you give a unicorn as an example of a not real thing as opposed to a platypus. But if we can talk of a real animal why can't we talk of a real idea?

Furthermore, I think that if we try to impose the concepts of realism and and ontology onto science we lumber it with useless baggage and take away from it's main strengths.

Science operates with a minimal set of assumptions and isn't that a good thing?

A thought-provoking OP. Perhaps the answer lies in the difference between a lie and a half-truth. Science seeks to sift between that which has no basis in reality and that which is a fractional glimpse of it. Science is shadows, faith is dreams.

I think scientists are implicitly metaphysical realists about the world, whatever their occasional claims to the contrary. Metaphysical realism is unproblematic to a physical scientist except at the very small scale - few chemists or biologists have doubts about the reality of the physical world. And even quantum physicists describe things in a realist way, that is they talk about physical particles having a probability of being in a particular place at a particular time. So it's clear they believe that reality is a a space-time manifold, some parts of which can be occupied by physical particles (and perhaps fields). Of course very often they do not bother to give such explanations, they just do the calculations without thinking too much about what is "really" going on. But this does not mean that they disbelieve in some kind of physical reality. Most seem to believe in it and why shouldn't they?

Chrisw wrote:I think scientists are implicitly metaphysical realists about the world, whatever their occasional claims to the contrary. Metaphysical realism is unproblematic to a physical scientist except at the very small scale - few chemists or biologists have doubts about the reality of the physical world. And even quantum physicists describe things in a realist way, that is they talk about physical particles having a probability of being in a particular place at a particular time. So it's clear they believe that reality is a a space-time manifold, some parts of which can be occupied by physical particles (and perhaps fields). Of course very often they do not bother to give such explanations, they just do the calculations without thinking too much about what is "really" going on. But this does not mean that they disbelieve in some kind of physical reality. Most seem to believe in it and why shouldn't they?

I'm afraid I have to disagree. It is only scientific reasoning and investigation that allows us to have doubts about the reality of the physical world. It is science that shows the sky is not really blue, that lightwaves are not bounded into colour bands, that matter is not solid, that gravity is curved spacetime, that time is relative, that subjective reality is different to objective reality, that souls are an illusion etc etc.

keyfeatures wrote:I'm afraid I have to disagree. It is only scientific reasoning and investigation that allows us to have doubts about the reality of the physical world. It is science that shows the sky is not really blue, that lightwaves are not bounded into colour bands, that matter is not solid, that gravity is curved spacetime, that time is relative, that subjective reality is different to objective reality, that souls are an illusion etc etc.

I don't see how science could ever cast doubt on the reality of the world. Science may cure us of various illusions we have about how the world is, but this just leaves us with different beliefs about a world which still exists and is real. Fancy philosophy apart, it's a pre-supposition of physical science that there is a physical world to investigate. We couldn't discover we were wrong about the reality of the physical world by investigating the physical world, could we?

When philosophers talk about (global) realism they usually mean the belief that the world exists and is not mind-dependent. So we don't need to be realists about the things we see in our dreams, as we believe they are conjured up by the mind. Clearly a biologist distinguises between real, physical creaures and monsters that people see in nightmares. One is an appropriate subject for a biologist to study, the other isn't.

I suppose you could be an anti-realist scientist if you had some kind of idealist view of the world. Some scientists' writing on quantum mechanics suggest this when they hypothesise that the mind plays a crucial role in "collapsing" wavefunctions. But this is a minority view. And even if it was widely accepted it wouldn't imply, by some reductionist logic, that ordinary middle-sized physical objects were unreal. Physical scientists would still investigate what they called the physical world and biologists would still distinguish beween "real" creatures and imaginary ones.

Chrisw wrote:
I don't see how science could ever cast doubt on the reality of the world. Science may cure us of various illusions we have about how the world is, but this just leaves us with different beliefs about a world which still exists and is real... Physical scientists would still investigate what they called the physical world and biologists would still distinguish beween "real" creatures and imaginary ones.

Science does not leave us with different 'beliefs' about a world which still exists and is real. It leaves us with theories and varying levels of inductive proofs. The evolving nature of these hypotheses are precisely what permits a questioning of the reality of the world. Otherwise all you are left with are irrational beliefs. When Plato conducts his thought experiment about shadow watchers in the cave, this is science in action. A taxonomy of unicorns would be a tricky proposition. However, neuroscientists might tackle how we create the reality of such creatures. Of course, all scientists are philosophers and all philosophers are scientists. The distinction is not 'real'.

Positron wrote:Furthermore, I think that if we try to impose the concepts of realism and and ontology onto science we lumber it with useless baggage and take away from it's main strengths.

Science operates with a minimal set of assumptions and isn't that a good thing?

Exactly. Science and ontology/metaphysics are best treated as non-overlapping magisteria, to borrow from Gould.

However, I and others are still waiting for anyone to make a good case for the possibility of "doing metaphysics" in any non-trivial or meaningful way, which isn't merely feeble and silly. There's metaphysics on the basis of faith, which doesn't prove anything. There are the claims of "direct access" to reality, for which there can be no evidence apart from anecdotes, obviously. Then there are the attempts to build up, logically, from what is supposed to be a priori knowledge in the form of (supposedly certain) immediate truth(s).

There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for instance, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, "I will"; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as "the thing in itself," without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: "When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I KNOW what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion 'I think,' assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further 'knowledge,' it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me."—In place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: "Whence did I get the notion of 'thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?" He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of INTUITIVE perception, like the person who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain"—will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?"

(Nietzsche, of course)

Mr Samsa was right. Science doesn't attempt to describe reality, certainly not on the level understood by people talking about something beyond the empirical world. Science allows us to reliably predict future observations. This predictive power gives us greater control over the empirical world, meaning that we can build reliable computers and aircraft. You could say science gives us a growing understanding of the workings of empirical constructs.

keyfeatures wrote:

Chrisw wrote:
I don't see how science could ever cast doubt on the reality of the world. Science may cure us of various illusions we have about how the world is, but this just leaves us with different beliefs about a world which still exists and is real... Physical scientists would still investigate what they called the physical world and biologists would still distinguish beween "real" creatures and imaginary ones.

Science does not leave us with different 'beliefs' about a world which still exists and is real.

Science certainly leads us to have beliefs. Do you believe that gold is denser than iron? That kangeroos are mostly found in Australia? That the Earth orbits the sun?

It leaves us with theories and varying levels of inductive proofs.

Theories about what? Sense data? I don't think that's how most scientists think of what they do.

The evolving nature of these hypotheses are precisely what permits a questioning of the reality of the world.

Scientists question the nature of the world. When do scientists question its reality? I'm using the standard philosophical definition of reality here as meaning that which exists and is not mind dependent.

OK I admit that scientists question the reality of the entities that feature in their hypotheses. Before the atomic hypothesis was widely accepted it was an open question as to whether atoms were real i.e. whether they existed. Maybe that's all you meant when you said that scientists have doubts about the reality of the physical world, that they can have doubts about whether any particular proposed component of such a world actually exists. But then it wasn't really an objection to my point that physical science mostly seems to presuppose a kind of global realism where the existence of solid objects dispersed in time and space and obeying laws of dynamics is taken for granted.

Otherwise all you are left with are irrational beliefs. When Plato conducts his thought experiment about shadow watchers in the cave, this is science in action. A taxonomy of unicorns would be a tricky proposition. However, neuroscientists might tackle how we create the reality of such creatures. Of course, all scientists are philosophers and all philosophers are scientists. The distinction is not 'real'.

I agree that science and philosophy are ultimately continuous. But it is still true that questioning the reality of the world is mostly left to philosophers and most physical scientists are straightforward realists like the rest of us.

seeker wrote:I think it's more reasonable to hold that at least one of the reasonable goals of science and scientists is to "describe reality", if "reality" is understood in its more usual sense (not a metaphysical sense that would make it completely unreachable for human beings, but the ordinary and "deflationary" sense that would allow us to distinguish between real and not-real things, e.g. between platypuses and unicorns).

I'd be interested to know why you think that a metaphysically real world would be "unreachable". Quite possibly I've just forgotten the relevant arguments but on the face of it it seems unproblematic to me.

Matthew Shute wrote:Mr Samsa was right. Science doesn't attempt to describe reality, certainly not on the level understood by people talking about something beyond the empirical world.

The OP explicitly rejected the metaphysical sense of “real” as “something beyond the empirical world”. I’d agree with you if this were the only sense of “real”, but it’s not.

Matthew Shute wrote:Science allows us to reliably predict future observations. This predictive power gives us greater control over the empirical world, meaning that we can build reliable computers and aircraft. You could say science gives us a growing understanding of the workings of empirical constructs.

The OP explicitly acknowledged that some scientific concepts are considered to be “useful empirical constructs” without assuming any real entity. But I don’t think that this interpretation can be applied to all the concepts of science. I think that platypuses are reasonably understood as real animals and not just as “useful empirical constructs”.

Matthew Shute wrote:However, I and others are still waiting for anyone to make a good case for the possibility of "doing metaphysics" in any non-trivial or meaningful way, which isn't merely feeble and silly.

I’m not talking about “doing metaphysics”, but about proposing models of ontology as taxonomies of scientific concepts. I think there’s a good case that it can be done and that it can be useful for some goals (mainly, for the representation and manipulation of scientific information in computer databases). See for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_onto ... on_science)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OBO_Foundry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Ontology

keyfeatures wrote:A taxonomy of unicorns would be a tricky proposition. However, neuroscientists might tackle how we create the reality of such creatures.

Sorry I missed this bit.

Neuroscientists study brains because they are real. Brains produce minds and minds imagine unreal things. But brains themselves are not imaginary. The brain activity that constitutes "thinking of a unicorn" is a real physical process. The unicorn is imaginary, the brain process isn't. And if we equate thoughts with brain activity then thoughts are real. But the things we are thinking of may be real (horses) or may be unreal (unicorns). It's an indispensable distinction for science.

This is basically (as far as I can see) the same as the issue of objectivity. Isn't science objective by definition? Can you have a subjective science? If instrumentalism denies the existence of an objective world that keeps all our subjective sense data correlated from one person to another how does it explain the fact that science is even possible?

Chrisw wrote:I'd be interested to know why you think that a metaphysically real world would be "unreachable". Quite possibly I've just forgotten the relevant arguments but on the face of it it seems unproblematic to me.

Some conceptions (ideas) of "a metaphysical real world" would make them unreachable by humans. For example, if someone defines "reality" as "what things are beyond our possibility of knowing them", the definition itself makes reality unknowable to us. But my point is that this is not the only available definition of "reality", and other more useful definitions are available to us. For example, in another sense, "real" is opposed to "imaginary", and the distinction is useful for us because we treat real things in a different way than imaginary things because we assume that real things (unlike imaginary things) have physical features with which other physical things (including ourselves) can causally interact. In this sense, the distinction is relevant to us.

seeker wrote:

Chrisw wrote:I'd be interested to know why you think that a metaphysically real world would be "unreachable". Quite possibly I've just forgotten the relevant arguments but on the face of it it seems unproblematic to me.

Some conceptions (ideas) of "a metaphysical real world" would make them unreachable by humans. For example, if someone defines "reality" as "what things are beyond our possibility of knowing them", the definition itself makes reality unknowable to us.

Maybe that's what scares off some scientists from being seen to make any ontological commitments? They think will automatically be taken to be saying something about an unknowable, transcendent noumena. But I'm not sure there is much risk of that these days. That kind of metaphysics is out of fashion in contemporary English-speaking philosophy.

seeker wrote:I'm not a philosopher, but I have some thoughts about some issues, and I'd like to know what you think about them.
MrSamsa once claimed here that "science doesn't attempt to describe reality". I was not convinced by this non-realist stance, I think it's more reasonable to hold that at least one of the reasonable goals of science and scientists is to "describe reality", if "reality" is understood in its more usual sense (not a metaphysical sense that would make it completely unreachable for human beings, but the ordinary and "deflationary" sense that would allow us to distinguish between real and not-real things, e.g. between platypuses and unicorns). For example, before describing the platypus, George Shaw (the first European to study this animal) believed it to be a hoax made up of various other creatures. It seems reasonable to say that George Shaw was trying to "describe reality" when he asked if the animal was real or just a hoax. I think that it's also reasonable to say that many scientific concepts are adopted as "useful tools" or as "models with empirical adecuacy" without any commitment about their real existence, but this doesn't imply that it's reasonable to generalize this instrumentalist/agnostic stance to the whole set of scientific concepts.
Regarding ontology, I think that it also could be understood in a "deflationary" way as a by-product of science, a taxonomy of what exists according to a given theory and its proponents. From this perspective, ontology is not an a-priori and atemporal catalogue of the ultimate components of reality, but a specification of the different stances that a community of humans in a certain place and time can assume towards some concepts, which can fall in a continuum from "assumed to be real" to "assumed to be not-real" with intermediate levels of reliance and agnosticism between the extremes.
My questions are: (1) is it reasonable to adopt something like this "deflationary" stance about realism and ontology? (2) If the answer is positive, which philosophers or scientists have adopted this kind of stance about realism and ontology?

I think what you have written here is a fairly common conception of what ontology is when looked at from the scientific perspective. That is, when one is coming from one discipline to another, one usually drags along certain methodologies, ways communicating, criteria of rigor or truth that are inappropriate to other disciplines.

First, regarding the deflationary sense of "real", you very accurately describe what you have done here as the "instrumentalist stance". Basically, empiricism no less than "metaphysical" ontology entails a very difficult set of epistemological issues; one way to address these difficulties is to put a kind of "limit" on knowledge -- to seek what is instrumental or useful within a certain horizon. We may thus accept that an empirical model is instrumentally viable though in some way incoherent -- this is perfectly valid methodological stance, perhaps even a necessary one for production of knowledge.

Regarding ontology, it has always been "thought about thought" and so has always done something like what you say -- asking how do we order and categorize ways of knowledge production, what does this form of thinking mean when they say "x exists" as opposed to that form of thinking, what are ethical and social horizons under which this form of thinking produces knowledge, is there an ultimate horizon under which all forms of thought can be coherently organized or is thought radically heterogeneous, etc etc. Ontology takes on the appearance of an "inverted world" because it takes thought as primary -- the forms of thought are its primary objects -- whereas most forms of thought (for example, medicine, astronomy, or chemistry) take some facet of empirical experience as primary.

think wrote:First, regarding the deflationary sense of "real", you very accurately describe what you have done here as the "instrumentalist stance".

I think I'm not describing the deflationary sense of real as the "instrumentalist stance". For example, I think we could defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards wave functions or spacetime curvatures, but I don't think it makes much sense to defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards platypuses or brains. That's why I've proposed a continuum from "assumed to be real" to "assumed to be non-real" with intermediate degrees of instrumentalist non-realist reliances.

seeker wrote:

think wrote:First, regarding the deflationary sense of "real", you very accurately describe what you have done here as the "instrumentalist stance".

I think I'm not describing the deflationary sense of real as the "instrumentalist stance". For example, I think we could defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards wave functions or spacetime curvatures, but I don't think it makes much sense to defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards platypuses or brains. That's why I've proposed a continuum from "assumed to be real" to "assumed to be non-real" with intermediate degrees of instrumentalist non-realist reliances.

Why should such a project be attempted, according to what method could it be accomplished, what are the underlying presuppositions generating such a method, and how would this project understand its own activity?

think wrote:

seeker wrote:

think wrote:First, regarding the deflationary sense of "real", you very accurately describe what you have done here as the "instrumentalist stance".

I think I'm not describing the deflationary sense of real as the "instrumentalist stance". For example, I think we could defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards wave functions or spacetime curvatures, but I don't think it makes much sense to defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards platypuses or brains. That's why I've proposed a continuum from "assumed to be real" to "assumed to be non-real" with intermediate degrees of instrumentalist non-realist reliances.

Why should such a project be attempted, according to what method could it be accomplished, what are the underlying presuppositions generating such a method, and how would this project understand its own activity?

Which "project"? I'm not proposing any new project. I'm saying that I think this is what scientists are already doing (see the OP).
If you're talking here about the ontology as a taxonomy of scientific concepts, I think that's what information scientists are already doing (see my links above).

seeker wrote:

think wrote:

seeker wrote:

think wrote:First, regarding the deflationary sense of "real", you very accurately describe what you have done here as the "instrumentalist stance".

I think I'm not describing the deflationary sense of real as the "instrumentalist stance". For example, I think we could defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards wave functions or spacetime curvatures, but I don't think it makes much sense to defend a non-realist/instrumentalist stance towards platypuses or brains. That's why I've proposed a continuum from "assumed to be real" to "assumed to be non-real" with intermediate degrees of instrumentalist non-realist reliances.

Why should such a project be attempted, according to what method could it be accomplished, what are the underlying presuppositions generating such a method, and how would this project understand its own activity?

Which "project"? I'm not proposing any new project. I'm saying that I think this is what scientists are already doing (see the OP).
If you're talking here about the ontology as a taxonomy of scientific concepts, I think that's what information scientists are already doing (see my links above).

I mean the project of ordering qualitatively different meanings of "real" onto a quantitative continuum. This is neither a "taxonomy of concepts" nor, to my knowledge, a scientific project.

Referring to this proposal:

That's why I've proposed a continuum from "assumed to be real" to "assumed to be non-real" with intermediate degrees of instrumentalist non-realist reliances.