Anish Seal

In this article, I develop a rational reconstruction of Hasok Chang’s (2012) “active normative epistemic pluralism” (ANEP). I identify the main conceptual resources Chang uses to define and support ANEP, and I assess the extent to which those resources vindicate his claim that the view both avoids relativism and yields a beneficial plurality of scientific “systems of practice” (Chang, The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, 2009, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25(3): 205–221, 2011, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117(2): 103–122, 2017f, Reasoning in measurement. Routledge, pp. 25–38, 2017i). On the basis of this reconstruction, I argue that Chang assumes, rather than demonstrates, that ANEP can exclude from its remit inquisitive arrangements that are widely regarded as scientifically suspect, such as astrology. I then formulate desiderata for any version of ANEP that aims to non-arbitrarily exclude practices commonly labelled “pseudo-scientific” or “non-scientific”. I argue that these desiderata are difficult to satisfy not only for ANEP, but for any epistemic pluralism that relies on epistemic values or epistemic contexts to constrain what counts as “science” or “scientific”. The core difficulty is to non-arbitrarily assess the comparative legitimacy of different interpretations of familiar epistemic values, such as predictive power and explanatory strength, when those interpretations are grounded in distinct meta-epistemic commitments. I support this diagnosis with an exploratory argument that draws on recent work in hinge epistemology (Coliva, International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6(2–3): 79–96, 2016, International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10(3–4): 346–366, 2020; Kusch, International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6(2–3): 120–142, 2016).

The practice of science appears to involve “model-talk”. Scientists, one thinks, are in the business of giving accounts of reality. Scientists, in the process of furnishing such accounts, talk about what they call “models”. Philosophers of science have inspected what this talk of models suggests about how scientific theories manage to represent reality. There are, it seems, at least three distinct philosophical views on the role of scientific models in science’s portrayal of reality: the abstractionist view, the indirect fictionalist view, and the direct fictionalist view. In this essay, I try to articulate a question about what makes a scientific model more or less appropriate for a specific domain of reality. More precisely, I ask, “What accounts for the fact that given a determinate target domain, some scientific models, but not others, are thought to be “appropriate” for that domain?” I then consider whether and the degree to which each of the mentioned views on scientific models institutes a satisfactory response to this question. I conclude that, amongst those views, the direct fictionalist view seems to have the most promising response. I then utilize this argument to develop a more precise account of the problem of differential importability, and ultimately offer a more general and less presumptive argument that the problem seems to be optimally solved by justifying comparative evaluation of model-importabilities solely in terms of comparative evaluations of what I characterize as models’ “holistic” predictive success.

Let us denote by ‘methodological normativism’ the thesis that part of the business of philosophical methodology consists in examining or influencing norms understood to determine, at any given time, methods actually used in philosophy. For the value of methodological normativism to be adequately recognized, there should exist a relatively standard “system” in which one evaluates competing views on how, and why, philosophical methods may be reformed. No such system appears to be standardly recognized, and the consequence is an unpalatable prolongation of debates on norms philosophers, as a matter of fact, follow in implementing philosophical methods. I will seek to develop, in what follows, a contextualist principle of arbitrating competing methodological proposals in meta-philosophy using insights well-entrenched in meta-metaphysics. In other words, I seek to discuss a possible way, afforded by meta-metaphysics, of systematizing methodological normativism.