Laudan’s Historical Critique
Larry Laudan is the foremost critic of the miracle argument on historical grounds. He points out, first of all, that the global claim that science is successful is a hopeless exaggeration.
Many scientific theories are spectacularly ««successful. We must confine ourselves to successful theories, rather than to science as a whole. But even among successful theories, they are many that enjoy some success, but are not completely successful. What this means is that a theory yields some true observational consequences and some false ones, saves some regularities in the phenomena but gets others wrong. Now assuming that the scientists involved have made no logical or experimental error, and assuming that the false predictions have actually been tested, a partially successful theory of this kind has been falsified. No sensible realist can invoke the truth of a falsified theory to explain its partial success! As we saw, it is only consistent empirical success, or empirical adequacy, that can be explained in terms of truth.Laudan’s historical objection to scientific realism consists mainly in producing examples of theories that were successful yet neither referential nor true. But most of Laudan’s historical counterexamples fall away, once we realise that they are examples only of partially successful theories, theories that were successful for a while but later turned out to be false (and in some cases, non-referential). No realist ever invoked truth to explain the partial success of a falsified theory. The Miracle Argument concerns only a very special case, the total predictive success of an empirically adequate theory. As we have already seen, the realist is right that truth (and reference) is the best explanation of empirical adequacy.
Actually, it is even worse. The chief target of Laudan’s famous ‘confutation of convergent realism’ (Laudan 1981) is what we might call ‘referential realism’, the idea that “reference explains success”.
To be fair to Laudan, this was the view that one could glean from incautious formulations to be found chiefly in Putnam’s writings. It is a view which has spawned what I have called ‘entity realism’, the idea that realists need not believe in the truth or near-truth of any theories, that it is enough just to believe in the theoretical entities postulated by those theories. It is not for nothing that Laudan attributes to the realist claims like “A theory whose central terms genuinely refer will be a successful theory”. And he proceeds to refute this claim by giving examples of referential theories that were not successful, and of successful theories that were not referential.Referential or entity realism is a hopeless form of realism. There is no getting away from truth, at least for realists. To believe in an entity, while believing nothing else about that entity, is to believe nothing or next to nothing. I tell you that I believe in hobgoblins. “So”, you say, “You think there are little people who creep into houses at night and do the housework”. To which I reply that I do not believe that, or anything else about what hobgoblins do or what they are like—I just believe in them. It is clear, I think, that the bare belief in hobgoblins—or equivalently, the bare belief that the term ‘hobgoblin’ genuinely refers—can explain nothing. It is equally clear, I think, that mere successful reference of its theoretical terms cannot explain the success of a theory. Laudan has an excellent argument to prove the point. Take a successful theory whose terms refer, and negate some of its claims, thereby producing a referential theory that will be unsuccessful. “George Bush is fat, blonde, eloquent and atheistic” refers to Bush all right, but would not be much good at predicting Bush-phenomena.
The ink spilled on reference is not wasted ink. That is because reference is (typically) a necessary condition for truth. A theory which asserts the existence of an entity will not be true unless that entity exists.
But reference is not a sufficient condition for truth. A theory can be referential, yet false—and referential, yet quite unsuccessful. Laudan exploits the fact that truth requires reference—and adds that near-truth requires reference as well. He produces examples of non-referring theories that were successful, and argues that since they were non-referential theories they were neither true nor nearly true. What chance, then, of explaining success in terms of truth and reference?But no sensible realist ever explained partial success in terms of truth and reference. Laudan produces no example of a consistently successful or empirically adequate theory that was (we think) neither true nor referential. The Miracle argument, as we have considered it so far, refers only to the special case of empirically adequate theories.
But can the realist take comfort from this rejoinder? Laudan might now object that the realist has jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Empirical adequacy is an extreme case, rare, perhaps even non-existent, in the history of science. Most, perhaps all, theories in the history of science enjoy, at best, only partial success. It is the sum of these partial successes that phrases like “the success of science” refer to. Now if the realist is only going to invoke truth to explain empirical adequacy, partial success is left unexplained. And, since the “success of science” is a collection of partial successes, the success of science is left unexplained as well.
There is, moreover, a further, very obvious antirealist question. If partial success is explicable at all, it must be explicable in terms other than truth. So why can we not explain total success in terms other than truth as well? I shall defend an obvious realist response to this: just as total success is best explained in terms of truth, so also partial success is best explained in terms of partial truth.
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