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description=Brad DeLong has a new post up where he gets critical about scientific realism and inference to the best explanation: Daniel Little: The Case for Realism in the Social Realm: The case for scientific realism in the case of physics is a strong one... The theories... postulate unobservable entities, forces, and properties. These hypotheses... are…;

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st explanation wtf is the only reaction i can have when i read daniel little ptolemy s epicycles are a very good model of planetary motion albeit not as good as general relativity nobody believes that epicycles are real there is something there but just because your theory is good does not mean that the entities in your theory are really there whatever that might mean although brad sounds upset i can t really see any good reasons why in a time when scientific relativism is expanding it is important to keep up the claim for not reducing science to a pure discursive level we have to maintain the enlightenment tradition of thinking of reality as principally independent of our views of it and of the main task of science as studying the structure of this reality perhaps the most important contribution a researcher can make is reveal what this reality that is the object of science actually looks like science is made possible by the fact that there are structures that are durable and are independent of our knowledge or beliefs about them there exists a reality beyond our theories and concepts of it it is this independent reality that our theories in some way deal with contrary to positivism i would as a critical realist argue that the main task of science is not to detect event regularities between observed facts rather that task must be conceived as identifying the underlying structure and forces that produce the observed events in a truly wonderful essay chapter three of error and inference cambridge university press 2010 eds deborah mayo and aris spanos alan musgrave gives strong arguments why scientific realism and inference to the best explanation are the best alternatives for explaining what s going on in the world we live in for realists the name of the scientific game is explaining phenomena not just saving them realists typically invoke inference to the best explanation or ibe ibe is a pattern of argument that is ubiquitous in science and in everyday life as well van fraassen has a homely example i hear scratching in the wall the patter of little feet at midnight my cheese disappears and i infer that a mouse has come to live with me not merely that these apparent signs of mousely presence will continue not merely that all the observable phenomena will be as if there is a mouse but that there really is a mouse 1980 19 20 here the mouse hypothesis is supposed to be the best explanation of the phenomena the scratching in the wall the patter of little feet and the disappearing cheese what exactly is the inference in ibe what are the premises and what the conclusion van fraassen says i infer that a mouse has come to live with me this suggests that the conclusion is a mouse has come to live with me and that the premises are statements about the scratching in the wall etc generally the premises are the things to be explained the explanandum and the conclusion is the thing that does the explaining the explanans but this suggestion is odd explanations are many and various and it will be impossible to extract any general pattern of inference taking us from explanandum to explanans moreover it is clear that inferences of this kind cannot be deductively valid ones in which the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion for the conclusion the explanans goes beyond the premises the explanandum in the standard deductive model of explanation we infer the explanandum from the explanans not the other way around we do not deduce the explanatory hypothesis from the phenomena rather we deduce the phenomena from the explanatory hypothesis the intellectual ancestor of ibe is peirce s abduction and here we find a different pattern the surprising fact c is observed but if a were true c would be a matter of course hence a is true c s peirce 1931 58 vol 5 189 here the second premise is a fancy way of saying a explains c notice that the explanatory hypothesis a figures in this second premise as well as in the conclusion the argument as a whole does not generate the explanans out of the explanandum rather it seeks to justify the explanatory hypothesis abduction is deductively invalid ibe attempts to improve upon abduction by requiring that the explanation is the best explanation that we have it goes like this f is a fact hypothesis h explains f no available competing hypothesis explains f as well as h does therefore h is true william lycan 1985 138 this is better than abduction but not much better it is also deductively invalid there is a way to rescue abduction and ibe we can validate them without adding missing premises that are obviously false so that we merely trade obvious invalidity for equally obvious unsoundness peirce provided the clue to this peirce s original abductive scheme was not quite what we have considered so far peirce s original scheme went like this the surprising fact c is observed but if a were true c would be a matter of course hence there is reason to suspect that a is true c s peirce 1931 58 vol 5 189 this is obviously invalid but to repair it we need the missing premise there is reason to suspect that any explanation of a surprising fact is true this missing premise is i suggest true after all the epistemic modifier there is reason to suspect that weakens the claims considerably in particular there is reason to suspect that a is true can be true even though a is false if the missing premise is true then instances of the abductive scheme may be both deductively valid and sound ibe can be rescued in a similar way i even suggest a stronger epistemic modifier not there is reason to suspect that but rather there is reason to believe tentatively that or equivalently it is reasonable to believe tentatively that what results with the missing premise spelled out is it is reasonable to believe that the best available explanation of any fact is true f is a fact hypothesis h explains f no available competing hypothesis explains f as well as h does therefore it is reasonable to believe that h is true this scheme is valid and instances of it might well be sound inferences of this kind are employed in the common affairs of life in detective stories and in the sciences of course to establish that any such inference is sound the explanationist owes us an account of when a hypothesis explains a fact and of when one hypothesis explains a fact better than another hypothesis does if one hypothesis yields only a circular explanation and another does not the latter is better than the former if one hypothesis has been tested and refuted and another has not the latter is better than the former these are controversial issues to which i shall return but they are not the most controversial issue that concerns the major premise most philosophers think that the scheme is unsound because this major premise is false whatever account we can give of explanation and of when one explanation is better than another so let me assume that the explanationist can deliver on the promises just mentioned and focus on this major objection people object that the best available explanation might be false quite so and so what it goes without saying that any explanation might be false in the sense that it is not necessarily true it is absurd to suppose that the only things we can reasonably believe are necessary truths what if the best explanation not only might be false but actually is false can it ever be reasonable to believe a falsehood of course it can suppose van fraassen s mouse explanation is false that a mouse is not responsible for the scratching the patter of little feet and the disappearing cheese still it is reasonable to believe it given that it is our best explanation of those phenomena of course if we find out that the mouse explanation is false it is no longer reasonable to believe it but what we find out is that what we believed was wrong not that it was wrong or unreasonable for us to have believed it people object that being the best available explanation of a fact does not prove something to be true or even probable quite so and again so what the explanationist principle it is reasonable to believe that the best available explanation of any fact is true means that it is reasonable to believe or think true things that have not been shown to be true or probable more likely true than not i do appreciate when mainstream economists like brad make an effort at doing some methodological ontological epistemological reflection on this issue unfortunately although it s always interesting and thought provoking to read what brad has to say his arguments are too weak to warrant the negative stance on scientific realism and inference to the best explanation share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky 4 comments brad concluded there is something there but just because your theory is good does not mean that the entities in your theory are really there whatever that might mean i have some sympathy with this view quantum mechanics is our latest and greatest but it might not be our last comment by henry 1 sep 2015 who knows what s out there for instance it might be that the world circumscribed by classical economics perfect knowledge no time exists but given our sensory and cognitive limitations we have no access to it after all what we know is what our senses bring to us piecemeal then integrated into a seeming continuum by our brain our only point of reference being a prior memory the notion of a platonic cave dweller casting shadows might even be too sanguine the cave may be completely dark comment by henry 1 sep 2015 i do not think brad s comment actually contains the fault you attribute to it he s very clear in his endorsement of reality as real it is just that he follows physicists in the reductionism of quantum physics if you ask physicists whether the entities of einstein s theory are really there they will say of course not those entities do not satisfy the quantum principle we very strongly believe that what we see as particles moving along geodesics in a space time curved by the mass energy pressure density is an approximate model a very good approximate model to emergent properties that are produced by some very different underlying set of real entities that are governed by the quantum principle that seems to me like a very clear commitment to a science of real entities to me the difficulty may be that daniel little says inference to the best explanation which gets lars syll to nod even while the rest of what little says seems to be inexplicably like a platonic faith in the super reality of nomological machines what brad delong appears to me to react to in little s remarks is the implication that the idea embodied in the nomological machine is real in some platonic sense our ideas of the world are real while observable phenomena are mere imperfect shadows einstein s theory of special relativity and its slightly younger bigger brother the theory of general relativity are not very far removed from the non euclidean geometry he used to derive them those theories are essentially maps to say as delong summarizes it that matter and energy moves along geodesics in space time is describing features of a map it should hardly be heresy to say that the map is not the territory you can recognize that the map is not the territory and still think the territory is real that it seems to me is brad s position einstein s relativity constitutes some really good maps granting various fudge factors but investigation of the nature of the territory must follow other quantum lines comment by bruce wilder 31 aug 2015 for starters this post confuses explanation of physical phenomena with explanation of social phenomena the key difference here is that explanations in the physical sciences do not change the reality of the event being examined and only true explanations can be applied in the practical sense the social sciences however involve an abrupt change when an explanation is true the phenomena in question are changed by correct conceptualizations or true explanations this does not happen with physical phenomena they do not change because of your explanation the role of feedback between social phenomena and explanations means that explanation is a never ending quest and there is no absolute truth because new concepts are always necessary to explain phenomena which change because of the recent explanations furthermore our beliefs or notions of absolute truth always contain some degree of error under new conditions beliefs like truth are always matters of degree or in gradations this is true in both natural and social science we must always consider our explanations fallible at least to the extent that a new circumstance may emerge in which our concepts do not fit although we may believe that they do so error is everpresent we should be critical of realism in the social sciences but we should also recognize that our conceptualizations must always be reworked because our social reality changes with each new conceptual framework in economics we see this occurring with the latest neoliberal reforms which are always trying to buy time to make the social reforms of entire populations through debt calculations in the hope that at some point everyone s work role and consumption pattern will meet their preconceptions comment by fred welfare 31 aug 2015 sorry the comment form is closed at this time recent posts arbetslöshetsiffran som styr den ekonomiska politiken 50 år efter studenten personal finding the late student stuff love s secret stein s paradox a lesson on precision and unbiasedness audioholic summer research ett välförtjänt bottenrekord arbetslösheten inte statsskulden är problemet how credible is the credibility revolution in econometrics randomness and representativeness are not the same lönebildning och arbetslöshet i sverige nancy cartwright s contributions to 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