Epistemic humility within the philosophy of science

The theme of epistemic humility will look different when considered in relation to different debates or topics. Contemporary philosophy of science offers a variety of candidates, of which I want to survey two—contingency and pluralism—each of which can inflect our conceptions of epistemic humility.

30.5.1 Contingency and science

Acceptance of the importance of engagement with the methods and results of the history of science is an established feature of the philosophy of science. Studying the ways that sciences have developed over time matters for all sorts of reasons, of course, although one of the more neglected reasons is that an historical sensibility discloses a deeper feature of the sciences—their contingency.

Taken broadly, contingency refers to the fact that the emergence, development, and entrench­ment of the sciences was and continues to be shaped by various contingent events and pro- cesses—material, social, intellectual, cultural, and technological. These are contingent in the sense that they might not have occurred or might have occurred differently to the way that they did. Put that way, talk of contingency seems a historical banality, but during the last century, a variety of philosophers began to argue that reflection on contingencies motivates important changes in our epistemic attitudes towards the science. Crucially, contingency can reveal that our scientific inheritance is a product of social and historical accidents, rather than deliberations and decisions that vindicate that inheritance over its alternatives.

There are two broad styles of ‘contingentist’ argument, popular among some groups of phi­losophers, which are worth noting because they are popular, but ineffective. First, there are constructionist arguments, popular among sociologists of science from the 1980s onwards, which emphasise the socially constructed nature of scientific theories, which are presented as the products of personal ambitions, institutional politics, and much else (classic examples of such work are Pickering 1984 and Latour 1987).

30.5.2 The modern contingency debate

The most comprehensive treatment of the modern contingency debate is provided by Lena Soler (2008a, 2015a). She lays out a range of positions on a spectrum between inevitabilism and contingentism which are distinguished by their different answers to the guiding question of whether the sciences could have developed in ways different to how they did actually develop and still count as successful. A contingentist, for instance, can argue that a non-genic biology could have emerged and in principle been as successful, explanatorily, as the biology that did actually emerge (Radick 2005), for instance, or that phlogiston theory could have become entrenched in chemistry instead of oxygen theory (Chang 2009). In each case, what’s often most in dispute is what Katharina Kinzel (2015: §4) calls the challenge of decidability—how, if at all, can claims about putative alternative developments of the sciences be decided in any principled way?

To see the connection of the challenge of decidability to humility, consider a standard objec­tion to contingentist claim about the possibility alternative successful developments. It owes to Ian Hacking (1999, 2000), who calls it the ‘put-up-or-shut-up’ objection—PUSU. Put bluntly, it is a challenge to those make contingentist claims: ‘put up or shut up.

At the same time that a Contingentist cannot ‘put up' the well-articulated alternatives to existing scientific developments, a parallel concern about failures of humility arise for their inevitabilist rivals who issue the PUSU challenge. In their case, the problem is the difficulty of their being able to warrant claims about the inevitability of specific scientific outcomes.There is a general sense in which certain scientific outcomes become inevitable at a certain point in their histories—for instance, entrenchment of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was all but inevitable in the 1950s, unlike ten years before (Cushing 1994, Pessoa 2001). But the inevitabilist goes further by claiming that the range of possible developmental trajectories is sufficiently determined that we ought only to accept scientific theories broadly similar to those which did actually emerge (French 2008, Sankey 2008).The usual arguments invoke metaphysi­cal considerations, although that is robustly challenged by the majority of participants in the contingency debate (an overview of which is provided by Soler 2018b and 2015b).

An impasse is reached, since neither the contingentist nor the inevitabilist can warrant their respective claims, in each case because they lack the necessary epistemic capacities to either put up their claims about the possibility of alternative development possibilities or the inevi­tability of the scientific theories and results which did, as a matter of historical fact, come to be entrenched. The impasse is noted by participants in the contingency debate, often in a vocabulary of humility. Hacking describes his own discussions of contingency and inevitability in science as ‘deliberately non-conclusive' (2000: 58), for instance, while Trizio speaks of our epistemic predicament as being one where we must

accept the existing science, without being able to rule out the possibility that it would have been different if the decisions of our predecessors had been different. And there is no way to prove that our predecessors had no choice, but to do what they did.

(2008: 258)

Humility is therefore a fundamental theme that sustains the contingency debate since it con­cerns the limits of our abilities to warrant robust confidence in the deliverances of the sciences which came to be (see Aylward 2019,Tambolo forthcoming).

30.5.3 Deep contingency

A further and more radical form of humility can be encouraged by some philosophers who emphasise what might be called deep contingency, not of specific theories or outcomes, but rather of the scientific worldview or scientific ‘picture of the world' (Kidd 2016). Historically, sensitiv­ity to the deep contingency of science is clearest in Heidegger's (1977) remarks on the con­tingent ‘ways of revealing' that made possible the development of our scientific ‘world-picture' and Husserl's (1970) reflections on the ‘crisis of the European sciences', to interesting remarks scattered through the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980) and Paul Feyerabend (1999). What these authors share is a sense that, had history and culture gone other ways, a very dif­ferent worldview or Weltbild could have emerged and become entrenched—one too different, in its ontology and laws, to count as a natural scientific account of any sort recognisable today.

The fullest account of this argument, which draws on the aforementioned philosophers, has been developed by David E. Cooper in his 2002 book, The Measure of Things, which has complex reflections on hubris and humility:

[T]he failure of any rival to the scientific image to become our entrenched view was not due to the recognition, after patient and prolonged investigation, that the entities and processes postulated by the rivals did not pass muster in comparison with those proposed by physics [.] The fact is that no one has ever tried, in detail, to develop the ‘research programmes’ indicated by such rival images of reality, or to compare them, in terms of explanatory scope, with those of the natural sciences.

(Cooper 2002: 194)

Against insistence that any rivals were doomed to fail, Cooper argues that the confidence expressed in their judgments could only be legitimate if the critic had epistemic capacities which they patently lack—those needed to ‘survey such rivals, to work out their implications, to compare them with one another and with our entrenched scientific account’, which no one does or could possess, and ‘to pretend that we not only could, but actually do, is to be lacking in humility.(Cooper 2002:195).

Similar arguments are there in Wittgenstein and Feyerabend, as reconstructed by Cooper (2017) and Kidd (2017c), respectively. Their general form is that our confidence in our most fundamental sense of what the world is like is at least partly a product of a contingent set of his­torical developments, rather than of a careful chain of deliberation and decisions.Appreciation of that deep contingency ought to affect that background confidence by adjusting our attitudes, for instance, towards those putative alternatives—a sense that Feyerabend conveys poetically in terms of a proactive sense of the ‘abundance’ and ‘richness’ of ways of conceiving of and engaging with the world. Such deep humility, on his account, acts as a guard against a natural drift into more dog­matic attitudes towards the scientific pictures of the (see Feyerabend 1993,1999; Oberheim 2006).

The current contingency debate in philosophy of science tends to play down talk of the deep contingency of science, although it does creep, for instance in Soler’s suggestion that attending to it could help ‘foster a profound change of spirit regarding science’, not least by motivating deeper, more critical reflection on ‘our scientifically based form of life’ (2015a: 42). I have argued that acceptance of deep contingency is necessary if one wants to take up a radically critical stance on the sciences, since it compels us to consider extremely different ways that science could have been (Kidd 2013a, 2017c). But this brings us to a second theme—pluralism.

30.5.4 Pluralism

Contemporary philosophy of science is currently experiencing a ‘pluralist turn’, the turn to a descriptive and normative vision of the sciences as plural—theoretically, methodologically, axiologically. Starting from a rejection of the monism promoted by Thomas Kuhn (1962) and other early to mid-20th-century philosophers of science, several major developments within the discipline contributed to a revitalising perception of the pluralistic character of sciences. Some standout examples were the ‘historical’ and ‘sociological’ turns, which made clear the plurality to be found within actual scientific practice, and the array of normative arguments for plural­ism developed by feminist philosophers of science. By the 1990s, the ‘disunity’ and ‘plurality’ of science was increasingly accepted (see, inter alia, Dupre 1993, Galison and Stump 1996, Kellert, Longino, and Waters 2006, and Mitchell 2003).

There are several ways that pluralism connects with the theme of humility. I focus on the active normative epistemicpluralism developed by Hasok Chang (2012: chapter 6), since he is most explicit about the constitutive connections of pluralism and humility. He distinguishes two forms of pluralism. First, tolerant pluralism, a weaker stance of tolerance for multiple systems of practice, each of them making its own distinct contributions, without any need for the systems to ever interact with one another.Tolerant pluralists accept the existence of alternative systems, forswear monistic ambitions to subsume them, and affirm the limitations of their own preferred systems (Chang 2012: § 5.2.2). Second, a stronger stance of interactive pluralism, which actively facilitates interaction between the different systems of practice, cultivating and mutually enrich­ing them to maximise their individual and collective benefits.This interactive pluralist is moti­vated by a sense that the ontological complexity of the world can only be captured by a plurality of partial, overlapping, changing, and interacting systems (Chang 2012: § 5.2.3).

Chang's account of active normative epistemic pluralism arguably builds in a range of dif­ferent forms of humility, each of which span the three levels described in Section 30.4.These include a reasonable humility about human epistemic capacities (2012: xx), acceptance of the limitations inherent to any epistemic practice (2012: 148), appreciation of human epistemic fragility and fallibility (2012: 238), an expectation that any successful system of practice will run up against its limitations sooner or later (2012: 258), a sense that reality is more abundant and complex than our minds can grasp through simple schemes (2012: 292), and a conviction that the fundamental nature or structure of reality is unknowable (2015: 363).

Gathering these points together, Chang makes explicit the significance of humility to his form of pluralism:

The most fundamental motivation for pluralism is humility: we are limited beings try­ing to understand and engage with an external reality that seems vastly complex, apparently inexhaustible, and ultimately unpredictable. If we are not likely to find the perfect system of science, it makes sense to foster multiple ones, each of which will have its own unique strengths.

(Chang 2012: 255)

Other pluralists add other connections, as when Dupre talks of pluralism as a ‘therapy' against the ‘monopoly of epistemic authority sustained by science' (1993: 262—263) and a check against attitudes, such as ‘the lure of the simplistic' (2002), a determined preference for reductive, mono- causal responses to complexity. Others regard epistemic pluralism as one way of guarding against the monistic excesses found, for instance, in many forms of scientism (Dupre 2003: 112 and Kidd 2013b, 2018b).

Much work remains to be done articulating these and other connections between humility and pluralism, and, more widely, to contingency and other themes in philosophy of science.A humble appreciation of the role of a long chain of contingencies can encourage an active humility about our epistemic attitudes those achievements, perhaps by encouraging us to be less confident in their inevitability in ways that might encourage a more pluralist stance—the sort of humility encour­aged in those images of standing on the shoulders of giants and the expanding circles of light.

Related topics

Chapters 0000

Biographical note

Ian James Kidd is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests include social and character epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the later work ofWittgenstein, Heidegger, and Husserl. He co-edited Wittgenstein and Scientism (2017, with Jonathan Beale), The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice (2017, with Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. and Jose Medina) and co-edited Vice Epistemology (with Heather Battaly and Quassim Cassam 2020). His website is www.ianjameskidd.weebly.com.

Notes

1 Interestingly, the phrase was in standard use from at least the 12th century (Merton 1965: 293).

2 A good study of Popper's critical rationalism is Rowbottom (2010).

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