This blog is retired, new blogging at wescholars.org

I have moved my blog and professional information to a new site: https://wescholars.org/blog/ Please check there for occasional posts on my current research and related work in philosophy and science.

A Gentle Introduction to Scientific Realism

Here are some notes for a discussion that I led yesterday at Ohio State's Philosophy Club. There is nothing really new here, but these notes might be helpful for students who want a short, basic introduction to some aspects of the scientific realism debate. More thorough treatments can be found via Chakravartty's "Scientific Realism" entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Does Science Tell the Truth? Notes for Ohio State Philosophy Club (Oct. 5, 2016)

Modern science presents us with many claims: the universe is more than 10 billion years old. The human species arose via evolution around 6 million years ago. Material objects are composed of very small molecules and atoms, built up out of even more fundamental particles.

Are these claims true? If they are true, how do we know they are true? The scientific realist argues that science aims at the truth and that many of the claims found in modern science actually are known to be true. However, many reject scientific realism: it is said to be too optimistic concerning our abilities. On this view, we may never know the truth about many scientific claims, and so we should adjust our aim to something more tractable.

What are the alternatives to scientific realism? One option is simple skepticism. The skeptic argues that we can never know any claim whose subject-matter goes beyond our personal, present experiences. In particular, we can never know about the past or the future. Some attribute this skeptical position to David Hume (1711-1776). It strikes many people as too pessimistic. Surely, there is something wrong with a philosophical argument if it reaches this pessimistic conclusion. I am more certain that I know that I have hands, to use G. E. Moore’s example (1873-1958, "Proof of an External World" (1939)), than I am in any philosophical premises of a skeptical argument. If this is right, then we do know certain claims, and the truth of these claims involves the past and the future.

We can draw on another example that Moore deploys in his lectures, Some Main Problems in Philosophy (1910-1911): "the sun and moon and all the immense number of visible stars, are each of them great masses of matter, and most of them many times larger than the earth" (p. 3). Here is an example of a kind of scientific common sense that most of us accept, and this shows we not only reject skepticism, but come some ways closer to the scientific realist.

There is an important intermediate position, though, that is best defended in our own time by Bas van Fraassen (b. 1941). He calls his view "constructive empiricism": it is based on a distinction between observable and unobservable entities. An observable entity is one that can be detected by an ordinary human being, unaided by instruments. So, a tree is observable because when it is there, and a human is appropriately close to it, the human can rightly come to believe that the tree is there simply by looking. But bacteria are unobservable because even when the bacteria are present, a human needs an instrument like a microscope to reliably detect it.

Clearly, it is easier to know the truth about observable entities. It is not trivial, though. The far side of the moon is observable in van Fraassen’s sense because if a human stands there, they can directly see its features (with a flashlight). But it is practically very difficult to get to the right position. Van Fraassen is not focused on these practical difficulties. He argues that there is a deeper kind of obstacle to knowing the truth regarding unobservable entities. As a result, he concludes, science should aim only at the truth regarding observable entities. He invented a special term for a collection of claims that get things right about observable entities: this collection or theory is empirically adequate. So, the constructive empiricist aims at empirical adequacy, and not truth. And much of our best modern science is, for the constructive empiricist, empirically adequate, even though we have no basis to conclude that it is true.

What is the difference, really, between truth and empirical adequacy? Consider the case of bacteria. If you are a scientific realist, then you believe in the existence of bacteria and their role in causing illnesses, e.g., from eating certain foods. However, if you are a constructive empiricist, you may use the bacteria theory, but you do not think that all of its claims are true. You accept only what it says about observable entities. So, the theory supports our practice of pasteurizing milk. Milk is observable, and it is observable that some people get sick drinking milk that has come directly from a cow. Heating is also observable, and we find that when we heat the milk, fewer people get sick from drinking the milk. All of this the constructive empiricist can accept. They can even use the word “bacteria”, but they do not think the claims about bacteria living in the milk, or being eliminated by the heat, are known to be true.

The scientific realist claims that the entire theory is true. Why would they add the truth of these claims to the empirical adequacy of the theory? One influential motivation is tied to explanation. The existence of bacteria is a crucial part of a good explanation for why pasteurization limits these illnesses tied to drinking milk. As realists put it, this is in fact the best explanation: the illnesses drop off because the bacteria are eliminated. But this explanation requires that the claims about unobservable entities be true. Our commitment to the bacteria explanation requires scientific realism. The constructive empiricist cannot offer this explanation.

Why should that matter? It seems a kind of wishful thinking: we want to have explanations, and so we adopt theories that allow us to explain what we observe. Often those explanations will appeal to unobservable entities. So our desire for explanations leads us to adopt scientific realism. Is this tie to explanation anything more than wishful thinking?

The realist responds that this form of reasoning is widespread and accepted by everyone who believes in substantial knowledge, i.e. everyone who is not a Humean skeptic. Why, for example, should we believe that the observable regularities that we find extend into the past and the future? Consider the very regularity that the constructive empiricist adopted for the case of pasteurization: when you heat milk, it is less likely to cause a certain kind of illness. This is what we have found in the past, but why accept that this pattern will continue into the future? One explanation of the past instances of the pattern is that we have a genuine regularity that is based somehow on the features of milk, heating and humans (the observable entities). This is a better explanation than the proposal that what we have found so far is just a massive coincidence.

Typically we accept the best explanation available, and believe its claims primarily because their truth does explain what we have found. This is inference to the best explanation (IBE). We employ it everyday life when (to borrow van Fraassen’s explanation) we conclude that there is a mouse in our house based on various sounds and visible signs. And the constructive empiricist uses it in a restricted way when they conclude that the bacteria theory is empirically adequate. And finally the scientific realist uses an unrestricted form of IBE when they conclude that the bacteria theory is true.

This brings us to the central issue that divides the constructive empiricist from the scientific realist. Is there a coherent way to restrict IBE to observable entities in a way that does not entail Humean skepticism? That is the realist challenge to the empiricist. Is there a convincing way to justify extending IBE from observable entities to all entities? That is the empiricist challenge to the realist. Let’s conclude by considering these two challenges in more detail.

Here is why it is difficult to restrict IBE and yet avoid skepticism. The arguments that try to show that one should not use IBE for unobservable entities seem to also show that one should not use IBE for observable entities. But if we don’t use IBE, then we seem forced to skepticism. An example of this problem recalls Descartes’ (1596-1650) method of doubt in the Meditations. He resolved to reject any claim if its truth could be doubted, even if that claim involved a fantastic scenario. So, I can doubt the existence of the past if I suppose that a powerful demon created me five minutes ago with all my memories intact. If we use the method of doubt to call into question IBE for unobservable entities, then it clearly extends to IBE for observable entities. And so we are forced to skepticism.

Constructive empiricists can respond by offering a different reason to worry about IBE for unobservable entities. Consider, they say, the history of science. The following pattern has played out many times in the history of science. A scientist uses IBE to justify their claim to the existence of a new sort of unobservable entity. That claim is then widely accepted, and leads to many additional scientific successes. However, after a period of time, a new scientific innovation is made, and the scientific community comes to reject that unobservable entity as an illusion. The worry, then, is that IBE for unobservable entities has a bad track-record. We should not use this method of forming beliefs because that method has been unreliable when arriving at the truth.

There are many examples that fit this pattern. One famous one concerns the "aether" that was proposed in the nineteenth century as the medium for light and then electro-magnetic radiation more generally. Here is how James Clark Maxwell (1831-1879) put it in 1878: "Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a consistent idea of the constitution of the aether, there can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform body of which we have any knowledge" (1878). The same point applies to theories of disease: before bacteria and germs were blamed for disease, many blamed "bad air". The "miasma" theory, as it was called, had many successes, but is now dismissed as a massive error. Who, then, can be confident in our own realist commitments, given this poor track-record?

The advantage of this argument is that it is not fully general, and does not obviously support skepticism. For the empiricist can point out that there are fewer cases of these sort of errors for IBE when it is used only to draw conclusions about observable entities. For example, we have theories about how to build bridges so that they do not collapse. Here the theory is tested by its successes. Sometimes bridges still do collapse, but the focus on the observable seems to have helped us get these claims right.

Does this meet the original realist challenge? If IBE about unobservables really is so much more unreliable than IBE about observables, then the realist challenge has been met. However, it is not clear if the historical examples really support this interpretation. Perhaps IBE about unobservables as it is done now really is very reliable. Various realists have tried to pinpoint what is different about 21st century uses of IBE. This is an ongoing debate that combines historical and conceptual claims about how science has been, and is being, done.

Let us turn then to the difficulty in convincing someone who accepts IBE for observable entities to extend IBE to unobservable entities. What can the realist say to convince someone to be a scientific realist? The key move is the link between an explanation and the truth. If we have a genuine explanation for why something occurs, then the explanation is made up of true claims. Consider something that we have found throughout modern science in the 20th and 21st centuries: science has made enormous contributions to technology and has also made many novel predictions about experiments that we subsequently found to be correct. To take two examples: atomic physics led to the development of nuclear weapons, and biologists have mapped the human genome. What is the best explanation for all these successes, both practical and experimental? The best explanation is clearly that all of these theories developed by the scientists are true. So, on this second or "meta" level, the success of science supports scientific realism. This is just IBE applied to science itself.

The constructive empiricist has a powerful response. IBE is admitted to be appropriate for observable entities. But this argument uses IBE for unobservable entities: the truth of these scientific theories requires the existence of unobservable entities. So, this argument in fact presupposes that it is appropriate to use IBE for unobservable entities. It presupposes what is in fact at issue between the constructive empiricist and the scientific realist.

So, does science tell the truth? The two main positions in the philosophy of science respond with a qualified "yes". The scientific realist argues that most or all of what science says, when it has generated successes, is true. The constructive empiricist argues that a restricted part of what science says is true, namely the claims it makes about observables, past and future. Neither position argues that science tells the whole truth. For both, additional philosophical reflection is needed to figure out what is true in science, and so it seems that philosophy is needed to get at one kind of truth: the truth about science itself.

Special Journal Issue: Indispensability and Explanation

There is a great new special issue of Synthese that brings together a number of new papers on explanatory indispensability arguments. The editors have also included comments on some of the articles. Here is the lineup:

Indispensability and explanation: an overview and introduction
Daniele Molinini, Fabrice Pataut, Andrea Sereni Pages 317-332
Parsimony and inference to the best mathematical explanation
Alan Baker Pages 333-350
Comments on “Parsimony and inference to the best mathematical explanation”
Fabrice Pataut Pages 351-363
The explanatory dispensability of idealizations
Sam Baron Pages 365-386
Which explanatory role for mathematics in scientific models? Reply to “The Explanatory Dispensability of Idealizations”
Silvia De Bianchi Pages 387-401
Evidence, explanation and enhanced indispensability
Daniele Molinini Pages 403-422
Equivalent explanations and mathematical realism. Reply to “Evidence, Explanation, and Enhanced Indispensability”
Andrea Sereni Pages 423-434
Should scientific realists be platonists?
Jacob Busch, Joe Morrison Pages 435-449
Indispensability and the problem of compatible explanations
Josh Hunt Pages 451-467
The varieties of indispensability arguments
Marco Panza, Andrea Sereni Pages 469-516
Naturalizing indispensability: a rejoinder to ‘The varieties of indispensability arguments’
Henri Galinon Pages 517-530
Grounding and the indispensability argument
David Liggins Pages 531-548
Nominalistic content, grounding, and covering generalizations: Reply to ‘Grounding and the indispensability argument’
Matteo Plebani Pages 549-558

Scientia Salon Discussion of Abstract Explanation Preprint

There is lively discussion of my preprint "Abstract Explanations in Science" (BJPS) over at Scientia Salon. Readers of this blog might be interested in checking it out, and supporting the site more generally.

Paperback of Mathematics and Scientific Representation is out!

Thanks to some good work at Oxford, the paperback edition of my 2012 book is now available. (It is listed on Amazon at least, and should be on the OUP USA website soon.) As much as I wanted to, I resisted the urge to make corrections and improvements.

My PSA 2014 talk (title, abstract and change in time)

This week is the 2014 edition of the Philosophy of Science Association conference. A great program has been assembled here.

Due to an oversight on my part, a conflict developed, and I had to request that the program chair move the time for my talk. The talk will now be presented on Friday Nov. 7th in the 4-6pm session on Explanation. I am grateful to the program chair for accommodating this last minute request.

Title: Newton, Laplace and Salmon on Explaining the Tides
Abstract: Salmon cites Newton's explanation of the tides in support of a causal account of scientific explanation. In this paper I reconsider the details of how Newton and his successors actually succeeded in explaining several key features of the tides. It turns out that these explanations depend on elements that are not easily interpreted in causal terms. I use the explanations offered after Newton to indicate two different ways that non-causal factors can be significant for scientific explanation. In Newton's equilibrium explanation, only a few special features of the tides can be explained. A later explanation deploys a kind of harmonic analysis to provide an informative classification of the tides at different locations. I consider the options for making sense of these explanations.

Two new papers on abstract (mathematical) explanation

There has not been much activity here lately, but I wanted to link to two new papers of mine that tackle the vexing issue of mathematical explanation in math and in science. I try to isolate a kind of "abstract" explanation using two cases, and explore their significance.

The Unsolvability of the Quintic: A Case Study in Abstract Mathematical Explanation
Philosophers' Imprint, forthcoming.
Abstract: This paper identifies one way that a mathematical proof can be more explanatory than another proof. This is by invoking a more abstract kind of entity than the topic of the theorem. These abstract mathematical explanations are identified via an investigation of a canonical instance of modern mathematics: the Galois theory proof that there is no general solution in radicals for fifth-degree polynomial equations. I claim that abstract explanations are best seen as describing a special sort of dependence relation between distinct mathematical domains. This case study highlights the importance of the conceptual, as opposed to computational, turn of much of modern mathematics, as recently emphasized by Tappenden and Avigad. The approach adopted here is contrasted with alternative proposals by Steiner and Kitcher.

Abstract Explanations in Science
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.
A previous version of this paper is online here.
Abstract: This paper focuses on a case that expert practitioners count as an explanation: a mathematical account of Plateau's laws for soap films. I argue that this example falls into a class of explanations that I call abstract explanations. Abstract explanations involve an appeal to a more abstract entity than the state of affairs being explained. I show that the abstract entity need not be causally relevant to the explanandum for its features to be explanatorily relevant. However, it remains unclear how to unify abstract and causal explanations as instances of a single sort of thing. I conclude by examining the implications of the claim that explanations require objective dependence relations. If this claim is accepted, then there are several kinds of objective dependence relations.

It remains to be seen if this "ontic" approach is the best way to go, but I believe it is a promising avenue to explore.

New Symposium on Glock's What is Analytic Philosophy?

The most recent issue of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy has just appeared with a long-awaited symposium on Glock's book on the nature of analytic philosophy. Discussants include me, Leila Haaparanta, Panu Raatikainen and Graham Stevens. Glock also offers an extended and helpful reply. This issue marks the end of the term of our first editor in chief, Mark Textor. I would like to thank him for all his work in getting this new open-access journal going. I would also like to welcome our new editor in chief, Sandra Lapointe!

Six Papers in Mind About Mathematical Fictionalism

The October 2012 issue of Mind (posted today here) has an extended discussion section where mathematical fictionalists of various stripes respond to Colyvan's earlier article "There is No Easy Road to Nominalism". The discussion concludes with a detailed reply by Colyvan. While I am a fan of neither Colyvan's explanatory indispensability argument nor its fictionalist critics, I look forward to reading this discussion and engaging with it soon!

The contents:

Jody Azzouni Taking the Easy Road Out of Dodge Mind (2012) 121(484): 951-965

Otávio Bueno An Easy Road to Nominalism Mind (2012) 121(484): 967-982

Mary Leng Taking it Easy: A Response to Colyvan Mind (2012) 121(484): 983-995

David Liggins Weaseling and the Content of Science Mind (2012) 121(484): 997-1005

Stephen Yablo Explanation, Extrapolation, and Existence Mind (2012) 121(484): 1007-1029

Mark Colyvan Road Work Ahead: Heavy Machinery on the Easy Road Mind (2012) 121(484): 1031-1046

E. O. Wilson on Science and Math

Prominent biologist and science writer E. O. Wilson has a provocative Wall Street Journal opinion piece about the link between mathematical ability and scientific achievement. Perhaps the central ambiguity of his argument is illustrated by the two different titles the article seems to have. The browser heading is "Great Scientists Don't Need Math", while the actual title is "Great Scientist Does not Equal Good at Math". While the latter claim is almost trivial, the former claim seems very contentious. Of course, I am biased on this issue, having written a book arguing that mathematics makes several crucial contributions to the formulation and justification of our scientific knowledge. But setting that philosophical discussion aside, it is somewhat disturbing to find such a simplistic view of the way mathematics helps in science being presented by such a distinguished scientist.

Wilson's basic idea is that great scientists don't need to be good at math because they can always call on specialists in the relevant areas of mathematics. On Wilson's picture, the great scientists come up with great ideas, and these ideas are then implemented and tested via mathematical models. But the ideas themselves are completely non-mathematical:

Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

Everyone sometimes daydreams like a scientist. Ramped up and disciplined, fantasies are the fountainhead of all creative thinking. Newton dreamed, Darwin dreamed, you dream. The images evoked are at first vague. They may shift in form and fade in and out. They grow a bit firmer when sketched as diagrams on pads of paper, and they take on life as real examples are sought and found.

Pioneers in science only rarely make discoveries by extracting ideas from pure mathematics. Most of the stereotypical photographs of scientists studying rows of equations on a blackboard are instructors explaining discoveries already made. Real progress comes in the field writing notes, at the office amid a litter of doodled paper, in the hallway struggling to explain something to a friend, or eating lunch alone. Eureka moments require hard work. And focus.

Ideas in science emerge most readily when some part of the world is studied for its own sake. They follow from thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence. When something new is encountered, the follow-up steps usually require mathematical and statistical methods to move the analysis forward. If that step proves too technically difficult for the person who made the discovery, a mathematician or statistician can be added as a collaborator.

Now, it is clear that some ideas that drive scientific discoveries are non-mathematical. But I do not see much evidence that most of these ideas are like that or that scientists should trust non-scientists to implement their ideas in mathematical terms. It is precisely at this stage that some of the most important and innovative work is done, and it is not clear to me how collaborations can work if one side, the scientist, doesn't understand what the other side, the mathematician, is doing.

See here for another critique of Wilson.

Two upcoming conferences on the history of analytic philosophy

This spring will see two conferences in the midwest on the history of analytic philosophy.
First, there is Early Analytic Philosophy 7, hosted by Indiana-Purdue University, Fort Wayne during the weekend of March 15th. The keynote speaker is Michael Mi of Soochow University (Taiwan). The call for papers for this conference closes on Feb. 15th. See here for more details.
Later in the spring, Indiana University will host the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy 2 conference. It is scheduled for the weekend of May 9th. The keynote speakers are Warren Goldfarb (Harvard), Joan Weiner (Indiana) and Peter Sullivan (Stirling). The call for papers for this conference closes on March 1st. See here for more details.

Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, Second Edition

I was lucky enough to be involved in the new edition of the popular philosophy of science anthology Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. It appeared late last year and, judging from its Amazon ranking, it is selling well! Martin Curd and Jan Cover did an excellent job on the first edition, but they wanted to update it by changing a few of the selections and augmenting the already considerable commentaries. Norton, the publisher, has been very generous with its review copies, so please feel free to request one if you think you might use it for a course!

Models and Simulations 4 (Special Issue of Synthese)

The whole issue is now online. Thanks again to my co-editor Marion Vorms, the authors and of course the referees.

Two reviews of my book

As far as I can tell, two reviews of my book have appeared so far.
The first is by Stuart Rowlands and was published in the journal Science and Education. The review summarizes the book and makes links to those working in education. I was pleased with how well the author was able to relate the more obscure debates in philosophy that I talk about to questions in science education.
The second is by Juha Saatsi and appeared in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Juha and I have been working on these topics from somewhat different perspectives for quite a while, so I really appreciated his critical feedback on the book. I think it is fair to say that he is generally quite positive, although he raises a few objections at the end. The most substantial objection concerns my worries about explanatory indispensability arguments for realism about mathematical truth. I claim that plausible restrictions on inference to the best explanation (IBE) undermine these arguments. It is hard to find a good version of IBE that justifies interesting mathematical claims like that there are infinitely many primes.
Saatsi worries that my restrictions on IBE are too restricted:

Although I won't argue for this here, it seems to rule out typical IBEs that some scientific realists take to support our best high-level theories, because such theories can often be replaced with a weaker explanans the content of which falls much short of the theory as a whole. Even if such a replacement is quite arbitrary and unmotivated from the theory's perspective, for a sceptic who has not yet accepted the theory it is an epistemic possibility that only the weaker explanans is true. So, by Pincock's lights, the theory on the whole cannot enjoy any justification deriving from its explanatory success. This 'anti-holistic' viewpoint goes against the view that a theory -- the whole theory -- with appropriate theoretical virtues can enjoy a degree of confirmation by virtue of furnishing us with a good explanation.

This is a fair point that I would like to continue to work on. First, what is a plausible form of IBE and, second, what sort of scientific realism does it really warrant if it is does not warrant new beliefs in mathematical truths?

Back to Blogging

After not posting too much for the last year or so, I am hoping to return to the blogosphere on a more consistent basis. As some readers of this blog may have seen, my book Mathematics and Scientific Representation appeared in Feb. 2012. So some of what I will talking about will develop claims and themes from that book, especially in connection with the ongoing debates about mathematical explanation. Also, I hope to link to the reviews of the book that will appear sooner or later.
A new project that I would also like to discuss is more under the heading of Mathematics and Scientific Change. It appears to me that scientists have gotten better over time at using mathematics in science in ways that avoid a few problems. The main problem I raise in the book is that we don't typically know the right interpretation for a bit of successful mathematics, and it is often not clear that the mathematics should be assigned any physical interpretation. So I now hope to trace out some of ways mathematics was used and misused over the last two or three hundred years. A first step: working through Harper's exciting new book Isaac Newton's Scientific Method.

New Book: Colyvan, Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics

Readers of this blog will be happy to see in print Mark Colyvan's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics (Cambridge) (Amazon, Google). I have not had a chance to read it yet, but the table of contents looks very encouraging. While traditional questions seem to be addressed in the early chapters, the later chapters take up such topics as fictionalism, mathematical explanation and applicability. There is also an intriguing "epilogue" at the end where mathematical results of general philosophical interest are discussed. Hopefully this introduction will mark a helpful complement to Stewart Shapiro's excellent introductory volume from Oxford.

Note: as part of my move to Ohio State, I have moved all my files to a new webpage: http://pincock-yilmazer.com/chris/. So, some old links on this blog will no longer work. If you can't find something on the new webpage, just let me know.

Preview of Special Issue from Models and Simulations 4

Most of the papers from the special issue of Synthese that I co-edited with Marion Vorms are now online. These papers represent a selection from the Models and Simulations 4 conference. Thanks to my co-editor, the authors and especially all the referees for their contributions to making this issue possible!
Marion Vorms and Christopher Pincock, Preface
Paul Teller, The concept of measurement-precision
Agnes Bolinska, Epistemic representation, informativeness and the aim of faithful representation
Brian Epstein and Patrick Forber, The perils of tweaking
Gordon Purves, Finding truth in fictions: Identifying non-fictions in imaginary cracks
Axel Gelfert, Strategies of model-building and the role of trade-offs in condensed matter physics
Peter Gildenhuys, Classical population genetics and the semantic approach to scientific theories
Marion Vorms, Models of data and theoretical hypotheses: A case-study in classical genetics
Ekaterina Svetlova, De-idealization by commentary: The case of financial valuation models
I will add the links to the remaining papers when they are available.
Update (1/2013): The issue has now been published here.

Conference: Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy

From May 24-26 at McMaster University, the first annual conference of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy will be held. The keynote speakers are Michael Friedman, Paolo Mancosu and Thomas Uebel. Additional information is available here. Thanks go to Sandra Lapointe for all her hard work of organizing and hosting!

New Book: Mancosu, The Adventure of Reason

While it came out in 2010, some of the readers of this blog may still not be aware of this important collection of Mancosu's articles on the interactions between logic and philosophy in the 1900-1940 period. I recently completed a summary of the book's contents for Zentralblatt Math that might be useful.

Vincent on Mander on British Idealism

Andrew Vincent provides a positive and helpful overview of Mander's recent book, British Idealism: A History. Based on Vincent's summary, it appears that Mander supports the claim that early analytic philosophers never actually "refuted" British idealism, at least in the sense of finding an argument from premises that the idealists themselves would have accepted. Another important theme of the book is the way in which British idealism arose as a reaction to empiricism and naturalism. This a point that Wollheim explored in his now classic study of Bradley. If British idealism is a reaction to British empiricism, especially Mill, then it is hard to accept something else that Vincent says:

In addition to the above philosophical influences, there was a range of issues and debates which also contributed to the rise and popularity of Idealism. For example, Idealism did respond very effectively to the social issues of the time. It was a philosophy that radiated optimism at a time of extreme social dislocation and pessimism concerning the appalling social and industrial conditions of the age. It offered a philosophy and a form of sophisticated understanding of political practice that gave a much needed emphasis to social cohesiveness and to the closeness of the relation between individual and collective responsibility. Its highlighting particularly of the importance of active social citizenship subsequently became an important theme in the early twentieth-century politics of welfare. In this sense many aspects of its output became associated, in some interpretations, with the development of a new social liberalism in the period from 1906 to 1914.

In the case of Bradley, at least, this seems implausible. I get the sense reading Bradley that it was the link between Mill's empiricism and Mill's liberalism that motivated Bradley to attack Mill's empiricism so thoroughly.
A point which Vincent emphasizes and which is more plausible is the internal divisions within British idealism:

By the later 1890s and early 1900s, younger members of the Idealist school began to divide up into factions. The key binary (although it is still a marked simplification) was between Absolute Idealists (Caird, Bradley and Bosanquet) and Personal Idealists (Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison, C.C.J. Webb, Hastings Rashdall, Boyce-Gibson, Henry Sturt and McTaggart). Absolute idealism, because it tried largely to characterise the totality of experience, was indicted for a multitude of crimes. It was accused of losing God in man, or man in God; dissolving things into thought; matter into spirit; abolishing all right and wrong; and truth and error. Its comprehensiveness and inclusivity was a virtue for some, but it was also the source of major problems for others. Idealist and non-Idealist critics alike were concerned largely about the idea of a unity above and beyond the individuals who comprised it, and which had a will of its own. This doctrine of the Absolute can also be found, to a degree, in Green's problematic idea of the eternal consciousness, as well as in Hegel's notion of Geist. What role God has in relation to these terms remained a divisive and unresolved issue, even among the more Absolutist-inclined thinkers. The metaphysical, moral and political danger of a diminution of the individual and subordination to a 'higher' entity was connected by some critics, such as L.T. Hobhouse, to both German militarism and the conflict of the First World War. These critics of Idealism became known as the Personal Idealists. Amongst them, though, there was -- as amongst the Absolute Idealists -- a good deal of internal diversity of opinions. The Absolute / Personalist debate is most vividly illustrated in a meeting of the Aristotelian Society in July 1918 entitled 'Do individuals possess a substantive or adjectival mode of being?'

I hope that Mander's book and other scholarship on the internal history of idealism can lead to new contacts with historians of analytic philosophy who are not always ready to recognize the important internal divisions within their own movement.