> On Sep 23, 2014, at 5:52 PM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Of course, sometimes we worry that there'll be major surprises. Of course > that happens sometimes. A convergence to truth will not always be smooth. > Peirce thinks that we should keep our perspective about what seem big bumps. > I ran into this quote from Peirce in Haack's "We Pragmatists":
I should add that this is why I like Peirce’s realism much more than most forms of scientific realism which assume a sort of convergence function I find rather dubious. > [Quote] > An opinion which has of late years attained some vogue among men of science, > [is] that we cannot expect any physical hypothesis to maintain its ground > indefinitely even with modifications, but must expect that from time to time > there will be a complete cataclysm that shall utterly sweep away old theories > and replace them by new ones. As far as I know, this notion has no other > basis than the history of science. Considering how very, very little science > we have attained, and how infantile the history of science still is, it > amazes me that anybody should propose to base a theory of knowledge upon the > history of science alone. An emmet is far more competent to discourse upon > the figure of the earth than we are to say what future millennia and > millionennia may have in store for physical theories ... The only really > scientific theory that can be called old is the Ptolemaic system; and that > has only been improved in details, not revolutionized > [End quote CP 2.150]. > > Improved only in details! Yes, I have a sense of the argument for that claim. > I find the first part of his argument, that science is young, more > persuasive. Still, there are plenty of still-cited scientific principles, and > still-used approximations, that are a hundred or two hundred or more years > old. > Although to be fair while theories have been maintained the way we understand those theories has transformed significantly. While Kuhn’s notion of “paradigm” has major problems (he admits in his retrospective it was an equivocative term) I think he’s right that it’s these foundational theories that do get overthrown. I’m not sure Peirce is being fair about what’s been swept away. I think the shift from alchemy to chemistry was huge. I’d say the change towards field theories with Maxwell was as well - although people still tried to interpret it the old fashion. But it is interesting that within a few years of Peirce’s death everything changes with numerous paradigm shifts - and ironically a state with two incompatible paradigms from which to understand theories. The question ends up being how to view foundational theories and what their relationship is to loser theories. That’s a tricky question and gets at the reductionism question. While I’m very sympathetic to the reductionist inclination, it also seems clear that theories often need significant changes to be reduced. Which is why biology ultimately was seen as non-reductionalist to physics even by many people who ontologically saw them as reductionist. How Peirce would take that I couldn’t hazard a guess. My own view is that Peirce’s approach (unlike scientific realism) provides a solution of multiple compatible theories which are all held simultaneously but which we can’t decide among. The classic example I gave is the literal interpretation of classical physics via the Newtonian form, the Lagrangian form and the Hamiltonian form. All three are mathematically equivalent but (unless one is an instrumentalist) appear to have very different meanings. It’s not hard to transform those three for quantum mechanics and such fruits have been successful. (One could argue that Feynman’s QED is simply moving from the Hamiltonian form of QM to a Newtonian form and then not taking it seriously ontologically) I think for Peirce we can have these multiple bumps with no convergence in our inquiry without difficulty even if Peirce himself probably wouldn’t have conceived of it that way.
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