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Confirmation for a Modest Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Laura J. Snyder
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Abstract

In the nineteenth century, William Whewell claimed that his confirmation criterion of consilience was a truth-guarantor: we could, he believed, be certain that a consilient theory was true. Since that time Whewell has been much ridiculed for this claim by critics such as J. S. Mill and Bas van Fraassen. I have argued elsewhere that, while Whewell's claim that consilience can guarantee the truth of a theory is clearly wrong, consilience is indeed quite useful as a confirmation criterion (Snyder 2005). Here I will show that, even when consilience gives evidence for a theory that turns out to be false, there is an important sense in which consilience shows that the theory has captured something correct about the natural-kind structure of the physical world. Whewell was therefore correct to claim that consilience provides a “criterion of reality” (Whewell [1847] 1967, vol. 2, 68). Consilience provides this by giving justification for the claim that we have really ‘cut nature at its causal joints’, to adapt Plato's famous phrase. Because of this, consilience can play a role in an argument for scientific realism.

Type
History of Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 72 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2005 , pp. 839 - 849
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Much of the material here has appeared in expanded form in Snyder 2005. I received helpful comments on presented versions of this paper from Michel Janssen, Jim Lennox, Sandra Mitchell, and John Norton. I also thank Peter Achinstein, Giovanni Boniolo, and Malcolm Forster for comments on earlier drafts.

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