internal realism and methodological ignorance

Ben SerberPHIL 920 Final Paper5/16/2015

Internal Realism and Methodological Ignorance

Introduction

Standard scientific realism appears to rely on a

correspondence theory of truth. For a scientific realist, the

fact that theories are true because their sentences correspond to

features of the world is taken to be a strength of the view. For

others, difficulties with reference make a correspondence theory

of truth untenable and thus militate against adopting scientific

realism. Falling into this latter camp, Hilary Putnam and

Nicholas Jardine offer two versions of a view called internal

realism. Internal realism aims to avoid the reference problems of

a correspondence theory of truth by offering a new conception of

truth that will still have all the features needed to uphold

talking and thinking in scientific realist terms. I will consider

these two internal realist views, along with objections drawn

from Thomas Kuhn and Kyle Stanford, before concluding that

neither view can fully defend against these objections.

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Putnam, in Reason, Truth, and History,1 offers a view on which a

sentence is true if that sentence would be true in the ideal

limit of human inquiry. However, Putnam’s conception of truth is

susceptible to two major objections involving his use of ideal

theory. The first is a Kuhnian attack on the possibility of

scientific convergence around a single theory. The second draws

on Kyle Stanford’s Principle of Unconceived Alternatives to argue

that asserting a sentence as true in Putnam’s scheme is more

epistemically troublesome than it is for a scientific realist.

Jardine’s The Fortunes of Inquiry2 responds to some of these concerns,

giving a view on which a sentence is true if that sentence would

be contained in an infinite inquiry series. Jardine argues, and I

agree, that his view successfully avoids the Kuhnian convergence

objection. However, as I shall argue, Jardine remains susceptible

to PUA-derived criticism; though he seems to be vaguely aware of

this, he does not adequately defend himself, and I don’t think a

strong defense is available. I conclude that ultimately neither

internal realist theory of truth can avoid the PUA-derived

1 19812 1986

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objection, and therefore that neither internal realist theory of

truth is successful.

Putnam’s Internal Realism

In Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam offers a new account

of truth in science that is meant to avoid the pitfalls of both

scientific realism and scientific antirealism. Internal realism

is meant to give us a realist-sounding semantics of truth without

appealing to notions antirealists find spooky, such as a purely

objective God’s-eye view3 of the world. The view ultimately

depends on a conception of idealized truth. For Putnam, truth is

whatever would be considered rationally acceptable under an ideal

theory. While Putnam acknowledges that we don’t have epistemic

access to such an ideal theory, I think he takes this issue far

less seriously than he ought to. Both Thomas Kuhn and Kyle

Stanford offer attacks on the convergence of scientific theories

which raise serious doubts for Putnam’s use of an ideal theory as

a ground for our uses of truth. Kuhn calls into question whether

convergence on a particular theory entails that theory’s higher

3 Putnam 503


truth value for both realist and idealized conceptions of truth.

Stanford’s Principle of Unconceived Alternatives threatens the

plausibility of theory convergence itself. In either case, the

objections leveled against scientific realism will stick just as

well against Putnam’s internal realism.

Putnam thinks that the use of idealized truth will get

around the problems scientific realism has with reference. In

particular, internal realism is meant to defend against issues

raised by his twin-Earth and model-theoretic arguments against a

correspondence theory of truth. The twin-Earth argument is used

to develop the idea of semantic externalism. Putnam offers a

comparison between Earth, where a clear, tasteless, potable

liquid is H2O, and twin-Earth, where a clear, tasteless, potable

liquid is instead composed of XYZ. He argues that we would want

to say that the word ‘water’ as used on the two planets has a

different meaning or a different reference, even though the

mental states of the planets’ inhabitants when using the word are

the same.4 This intuition that ‘water’ refers to clearly

4 Putnam 234


different things on the two planets despite the mental states’

being the same then pushes us to acknowledge that the reference

of our terms is not fixed by what mental state we’re in. Rather,

the referent of a term is at least partially set by the actual

object or kind of object to which the term is meant to refer.5

But if this is so, then a correspondence theory of truth

contains a serious pitfall. Namely, truth systematically

underdetermines reference. Putnam shows that for any sentence,

e.g. “The cat is on the mat,” it is possible to build a sentence

“A cat* is on a mat*” where ‘cat*’ and ‘mat*’ refer to objects

that are sometimes cats and sometimes cherries, or sometimes mats

and sometimes trees, respectively.6 These definitions of cat* and

mat* can be set up so that “A cat is on a mat” has the same truth

conditions as “A cat* is on a mat*” – and the same truth

conditions as “A cherry is on a tree.” This is to say that being

able to specify the truth conditions of a sentence cannot

guarantee that the terms in that sentence refer to the objects

they’re thought to refer to. Adding semantic externalism puts the

5 Putnam 256 Putnam 33-5

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correspondence theory into even more trouble. If reference is

partially fixed by objects in the world, and the truth conditions

of a theory7 underdetermine the referents of its terms, then a

true theory does not necessarily lock on to one and only one set

of objects.8 At the global level, this means that a true theory,

which on a correspondence view should pick out and describe one

and only one global set of objects – that is to say, one actual

world – cannot do so. Thus if semantic externalism is correct,

the employment of a correspondence theory of truth will deeply

undermine a key tenet of scientific realism: that scientific

theories necessarily refer to the actual world. Putnam then

attempts to offer a view of truth that can avoid this pitfall.

The move to truth as assertibility at the limit of inquiry

is supposed to get us all the support for making realist-sounding

statements in science (and probably more generally too) that can

be gotten without appealing to some magical, inexplicable

connection between words and objects. For Putnam, “truth is an

7 Which, being a body of sentences, will behave the same as a single sentence for this purpose8 At this point I move beyond Putnam’s original point, but I think this is oneof the problems he was trying to illuminate

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idealization of rational acceptability.”9 That is, a statement is

true just in case it would be rationally accepted under an ideal

theory using the maximal evidence it’s possible for humans to

gain.

Putnam takes this view of truth to preserve two key

characteristics upon which scientific realists rely. First,

idealized truth preserves the idea that true statements can

always be justified by appealing to the ideal theory – a complete

science will be able to offer a justification for any apparent

state of affairs. Simultaneously, Putnam thinks idealized truth

avoids the common epistemic concern that the possibility of our

current justifications being overturned weakens our grasp on

truth, since the failure of our present justifications has no

bearing on which statements would be justified under the ideal

theory. Second, idealized truth retains a point of convergence:

the ideal theory. Since true statements have to be justifiable,

under an ideal theory it’s impossible to justify both a true

statement and its negation.10 Accordingly, an ideal theory will

9 55, emphasis his10 Putnam 56

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converge to one stable value around the statements that can be

most strongly justified. So although there’s no spooky objective

Truth out there, our inquiry still aims at something specific –

idealized truth – and that thing can be specified in a way that

can be understood even now, when we don’t have epistemic access

to the contents of the ideal theory that’s underwriting the truth

of our statements.

Objections to Putnam

Unfortunately for Putnam, the objections that Kuhn and

Stanford level against realist claims of theory convergence will

hold up just as well against his idealized truth. To begin, let’s

consider Kuhn’s clarification of his position offered in

“Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice.”11 While Kuhn

explicitly steps back from the more radical interpretations of

the view originally given in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,12 he

retains the basic claim that scientific practice cannot be proven

to necessarily converge on a single theory derived from a set of

shared values. The core of this argument is based on Kuhn’s

11 197712 1964

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observation that scientific convergence on a particular theory as

the most likely to be correct is entirely compatible with

individual scientists making their individual theory choices for

different reasons. That is, convergence around a theory does not

constitute evidence that scientists have converged about the

values that have led them to converge around the theory. They may

in fact have done so, but that can’t be inferred from convergence

around a theory. Furthermore, Kuhn argues, even if the

convergence does derive in practice from a set of shared values,

each scientist is still applying those values based on their own

subjective criteria that arise contingently in their individual

psychologies. So even if scientists converge on a theory and they

do so because of a set of shared values, the dual convergence

does not prove that the convergence on values necessarily follows

from the convergence on a particular theory. This second claim is

stronger, but I don’t think it’s necessary for Kuhn’s weaker

point about convergence on a value system to hold up. This point

clearly cuts just as strongly against Putnam as it does against a

scientific realist. Convergence on a scientific theory no more

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proves that scientists have converged on a commitment to truth as

being true in the ideal theory than it proves that they have

converged on a commitment to truth as correspondence to an

objective external world. If Kuhn’s stronger claim is accepted,

it will cut against Putnam as well: even if all scientists are

committed to using values derived from idealized truth to guide

their theory choices, their subjectivity in applying those values

still means that they’re not all converging on one precise and

singular view of idealized truth any more than they would be in a

scientific realist picture. I think Putnam’s best reply here can

only be that his view does no worse against the Kuhnian objection

to convergence than scientific realism would. If internal realism

has other advantages over scientific realism, such as the

solutions it offers to problems with reference, then it might

still be preferred to scientific realism on those grounds.

Though that reply is available in the case of Kuhn,

Stanford’s Principle of Unconceived Alternatives is actually more

damaging to an internal realist than to a scientific realist.

Stanford’s essential claim is that arguments over empirically

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equivalent theories have missed the point. The question is not

whether two theories that are completely empirically equivalent

can be generated: even if this were so, “one or a few convincing

examples…are unable to support the sweeping conclusion that there

are likely serious empirical equivalents to most theories in most

domains of scientific inquiry.”13 Rather, the worry about the

underdetermination of theory by evidence derives from the fact

that at any given moment there could be perfectly ordinary

hypotheses which better explain the evidence but which nobody has

yet imagined.14 Stanford surveys the history of science in an

attempt to show that we have consistently been in positions where

the evidence for our presently held theory later turned out to be

equally strong evidence for another radically different theory.15

He concludes by induction that we have good reason to think that

any evidence we have for a present theory is equally good

evidence for at least one radically different, as yet unconceived

theory. If this induction holds up, then scientists are

13 Stanford S6-S714 Stanford S715 S9

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frequently in a position where they have no idea what will

supplant their currently held theory and the claim that we can

have a remotely coherent picture of what science converges on

will be severely damaged. In consequence, Putnam will have even

more trouble explaining convergence on a theory than a scientific

realist would. Under an idealized truth view, scientists

converging on a theory are converging on what sentences they

think could be justified in an ideal theory. But if PUA is true,

internal realism introduces an entire extra layer of epistemic

uncertainty into the scientific process. PUA cuts against not

only our knowledge of what sentences can be justified under an

ideal theory, but also our metatheorizing about how the sentences

in the ideal theory might be justified.

A scientific realist asserts that a sentence is true using a

correspondence view, and must then face Stanford-style

uncertainty as to whether viable competing explanations exist but

have not been conceived. The first point of PUA-derived

uncertainty for the internal realist is similar. An internal

realist assertion of a sentence is essentially an assertion about

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the contents of the ideal theory. But PUA entails that – since we

may not have any way to imagine what sentences will be included

in our next theory – we likely have no way to imagine what

sentences would be included in the ideal theory. So to an extent

the internal realist faces the same worry as the scientific

realist. However, since the ideal theory will differ from our

present theory in at least some respects simply by definition,

the internal realist can allow for a degree of fallibilism here

that doesn’t seem available to the scientific realist. The larger

problem arises in the context of justifying the presence or

absence of a particular sentence from the ideal theory – that is,

in justifying an internal realist’s truth claims.

This second objection, which I call the argument from

methodological ignorance, proceeds as follows. To fully justify

the assertion of a sentence in the present, an internal realist

owes an explanation of why that sentence will be in the ideal

theory. I could assert that the sentence “The moon is made of

green cheese” will be in the ideal theory. In order to privilege

her (present) assertion that the sentence “The moon is made of

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regolith” would be in the ideal theory and my sentence would not

over the inverse, an internal realist would need to explain why

this would be so. But specific claims about the contents of the

ideal theory (dealt with above) and the justification for their

presence in it16 are both subject to PUA; put another way, there

is likely at least one unconceived alternative to our metatheory

about the principles the ideal theory will use to explain the

sentences in it. Our past and present theories are the only

evidence we could have for thinking about what would be in an

ideal theory and why. But because our future theories, and thus

the ideal theory, could be radically different in ways we haven’t

imagined, this isn’t very good evidence for making claims about

the ideal theory. Even if many sentences are contained in both

our present theory and the ideal theory,17 PUA entails that we

can’t predict why those sentences are contained in both our

present theory and the ideal theory because we may not have

imagined how they will be justified in the future. This is to say

that we are at least partly ignorant of the methodologies that

16 Which all internal realist truth assertions are.17 As many sentences have in fact been preserved through theory changes

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future scientists will employ. This seems like a trivial claim,

but that ignorance seems to have a deep bearing on our ability to

ground claims about how the ideal theory will justify the

sentences it contains. Since we derive our claims about the ideal

theory from the same evidence as our claims about our current

theory, but are making stronger claims in doing so, claims about

the contents and justification of an ideal theory are actually

more epistemically dubious than claims about a current theory. In

short, we’re even less able to conceive of alternatives to our

imagined ideal theory than we are to conceive of alternatives to

our actual current theories. This means that any way we go about

justifying the inclusion of a sentence in the ideal theory will

be speculative at best, and fails to give us ground to privilege

any specific assertion that a sentence will be in the ideal

theory18 over any other. Accordingly, claiming that science

converges on the sentences that would be justified under ideal

theory is even more tenuous than claiming that science converges

on truth.

18 i.e. any truth claim15


These two objections, particularly the argument from

methodological ignorance, illustrate why Putnam needs to take far

more heed of the epistemic objections to his use of ideal theory.

Adopting his picture of idealized truth makes internal realism

more vulnerable to at least some of these epistemic concerns than

scientific realism already is. If internal realism’s account of

scientific convergence presents more problems than scientific

realism does, then even if internal realism does solve some

problems with reference it may still be unsuccessful overall.

Nicholas Jardine attempts to account for some of these

difficulties with his absolute series version of internal

realism.

Jardine’s Absolute Series View

Jardine considers difficulties with convergence to be fatal

for Putnam’s version of idealized truth for two general reasons.

First, he agrees with Kuhn that the history of science fails to

show that convergence has reliably taken place, and that even if

science has converged around elements of a theory, this does not

prove that they have converged on a set of values for theory

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choice.19 Second, he notes that to serve as a standard of truth

that will yield properties like transcendence, Putnam would have

to “show that the theory which lies at the actual limit of human

inquiry lies also at the limit of all possible suitably conducted

inquiries.”20 That is, for truth in the internal realist scheme

to retain the desired power, the ideal theory must necessarily

result at the limit of the scientific process. So to show that

science will necessarily converge on the ideal theory, it must be

proven that all possible science, including non-human science or

counterfactual science,21 would converge on the very same ideal

theory. We may have intuitions that this would be so, but the

claim seems quite difficult to actually prove. The failure of the

original internal realist view then motivates his move to

considering truth as presence in an absolute inquiry series.

A brief exposition of this idea of an absolute inquiry

series will now be offered. An inquiry series is an infinite

temporally indexed sequence of theories. A sequence is composed

19 Jardine 16-720 Jardine 1921 Jardine offers the survival of Archimedes as one example (18).

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of some theory Ti that was, is, or will be held, theory Ti+1 that

will be the next one held and so on; an infinite sequence merely

repeats this iterative process indefinitely. A sentence S is true

from the perspective of a particular theory T if S is in T. By

extension, S is true in an inquiry series if S is in any one

theory in the series and is in all theories that follow S’s

initial appearance. Note, however, that the truth of S in an

inquiry series is still a far cry from a more global sort of

truth. For this reason, Jardine lays out three additional

conditions that an inquiry series must meet in order to be

considered an absolute inquiry series. The truth of S in an

absolute inquiry series, Jardine argues, will be a workable

definition of truth more generally.

The first condition imposed is that the inquiry series must

resolve all questions that are well-posed from the standpoint of

the theories in the series.22 A well-posed question for a given

theory is one with a determinate answer23 that is susceptible to

22 Jardine 25-623 Question Q has a determinate answer if either Q or ¬Q is contained in the theory.

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evidence24 and whose presuppositions are also true in that

theory. In essence, the infinite resolution of questions

condition requires that an inquiry series eventually actually

answers every question which it is capable of asking. The second

condition is infinite transcendence of error.25 For Jardine, an

inquiry series overcomes a particular source of error26 if a

theory in the series and all subsequent theories in the series

overcome that source of error. An inquiry series is infinitely

transcendent of error if this can be done for all sources of

error for that series. That is, an inquiry series that is

infinitely transcendent of error ultimately fixes all problems of

which it can be aware. The third condition, absolute dominance,

is Jardine’s response to the fact that the first two conditions

alone could produce many inquiry series that are trivial or

infected with systematic error that the standpoints of the series

would fail to recognize.27 Therefore, to effectively ground a

broader conception of truth, an inquiry series must absolutely

24 Jardine offers notable caveats on this point (26).25 Jardine 2626 From the standpoint of the series.27 26-7

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dominate all other inquiry series. If two inquiry series are

divergent about a question,28 one series dominates the other if

it can provide an account from its standpoint “which explains the

whole of the divergence in terms of error and/or limitation in

the procedures of inquiry that generate”29 the dominated series.

An inquiry series is absolutely dominant if it dominates all

series that diverge from it and is not dominated by any other

series. Informally, an absolutely dominant inquiry series can

always explain why a divergent series is wrong.

With this framework in place, Jardine thinks he has given a

version of truth that retains the strengths of Putnam’s internal

realism while avoiding convergence objections. For Jardine, S is

true just in case S is true in an inquiry series which is

infinitely resolutive of questions, infinitely transcends error,

and absolutely dominates all other inquiry series. It is the case

that any sentence that is true in one absolute inquiry series

must be true in all absolute inquiry series, and likewise that

28 e.g. one series answers the question affirmatively and the other negatively, though Jardine notes other permutations – anything other than complete agreement will count as divergence (28)29 Jardine 28.

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any sentence that is false in one absolute inquiry series must be

false in all of them.30 This helps to preserve the universal

sense we want from truth However, the necessary agreement of all

absolute inquiry series does not entail that there cannot be

multiple absolute inquiry series, nor does it entail that the

permutations of theories that constitute each series must be

identical. Though absolute inquiry series must eventually agree

on what is true, they do not have to follow one particular path

to do so. This avoids the basic objection that science does not

seem to be converging on anything in particular – Jardine’s view

acknowledges the incremental and highly contingent nature of the

scientific process. Nor, importantly, must two absolute inquiry

series necessarily use the same methodologies or principles of

theory selection to reach their eventual agreement. This allows

Jardine to get out of the more nuanced Kuhnian worry that

convergence on the contents of a theory does not entails

convergence on scientific values. At least initially, this seems

30 Ibid.21


like a promising modification for an internal realist theory of

truth.

Objections to Jardine

Unfortunately, the absolute series view remains vulnerable

to the argument from methodological ignorance.31 As with Putnam,

the difficulty is best brought out when we look at what it to

assert a sentence in this picture. For Jardine, asserting S is

equivalent to claiming that S is in a past or present theory and

will be present in every successive theory. But such an assertion

is no more grounded than a Putnam-style claim that S will be

present in the ideal theory. There at least two related problems

here. First, standard general worries about induction can be

applied to a Jardine-style assertion. That is, the presence of S

in a given present theory does not prove that it will be present

even in an immediate successor theory, let alone a remote

successor theory. While S’s preservation through several

permutations of theories would give us stronger grounds for

thinking it will continue to do so, even this does not prove that

31 Another route of objection is to question the possibility of an absolute inquiry series even existing, as in Liston 1992.

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S will be preserved in remote successor theories. Indeed, we will

never be able to definitively prove that S is true in an absolute

inquiry series, simply because the contents of remote successor

theories are epistemically inaccessible to us. Jardine’s account

does permit a fairly high degree of fallibilism, so he might be

comfortable with calling sentences that have proven to be

preserved through several theory permutations ‘likely true’ or

‘approximately true’ in much the way a realist might do in the

face of similar difficulties. The second objection is more

telling, however. Methodological ignorance reappears here in the

following way. Even if the presence of S in previous theories did

correlate with its presence in all subsequent theories, we could

not explain why it was being preserved across theories. Because

we are ignorant of the methodology that will support the theory

that immediately succeeds the one we have, we do not have an

explanation for why S should be preserved from a present theory

to its immediate successor. This problem will then reappear in

every iteration of theory within the absolute inquiry series: if

we can’t explain the preservation of S from Ti to Ti+1, we can’t

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explain its persistence from Ti+1 to Ti+2, and so on. Because some

justification for the preservation of S needs to be made at each

of these steps, asserting that S will be preserved all the way to

Tn looks very dubious. Put slightly glibly, Jardine’s view has

the same problem with explanation as Putnam’s, but has it an

infinite32 number times. Appeals to broad scientific values such

as parsimony may be helpful in explaining the preservation of S

from past theories to our present one. The move may even be

reasonably successful at predicting the reason(s) why S is

preserved from a present theory to its immediate successor. But

recall the original argument from methodological ignorance: it is

likely that there is at least one unconceived but functional

metatheory about which scientific values are applicable. So an

appeal to our present scientific values cannot offer a definitive

forward-looking explanation of why S will be preserved, since S’s

presence in one or more of the future theories in the series

might be justified on entirely different grounds. In the end,

Jardine’s view amounts to the claim that we can somehow know at

32 Or at least an indefinite number of times.24


the moment of assertion that any sentence we assert will persist

first through a permutation from our present theory to an

unconceived theory, and then from that unconceived theory to

another unconceived theory, proceeding an indefinite33 number of

times, while our scientific methodologies and values also go

through an indefinite34 number of unconceived changes.35 Even if

we could know that, we still couldn’t know why it should be so.

Conclusion

I think I have successfully argued that neither Putnam’s

original view of truth as assertibility in the ideal theory nor

Jardine’s view of truth as preservation through an absolute

inquiry series can hold together. While each succeeds in solving

the specific problem it set out to solve – Putnam with reference

and Jardine with convergence – they remain susceptible to strong

epistemic challenges based on Stanford’s Principle of Unconceived

Alternatives. The difficulties in building a theory of truth that

can support an internal realist account provide a strong reason

33 But probably quite large34 But also probably quite large35 This sentence probably seems strongly stated. It ought to. A Jardinian truth assertion is a very strong claim.

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for rejecting internal realism more broadly. In sum: we may not

know which account of scientific inquiry is correct, but I think

we can know that this one is not.

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Bibliography

Jardine, Nicholas. The Fortunes of Inquiry. Oxford University Press: New York, 1986. Print.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of ChicagoPress: Chicago,

1964. Print.

---. “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice.” The EssentialTension: Selected Studies

in Scientific Tradition and Change. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1977. 356-68.

Print.

Liston, Michael. Rev. of The Fortunes of Inquiry, by Nicholas Jardine.The Philosophical

Review, 101.2 (1992): 133-6. Print.

Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge University Press:New York, 1981.

Print.

Stanford, P. Kyle. “Refusing the Devil’s Bargain: What Kind of Underdetermination Should We

Take Seriously?” Philosophy of Science 68.3 (2001): S1-S12. Print.

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internal realism and methodological ignorance

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