Hacking 4-8 Prag Essay

Hacking writes that he was a realist only in the most 'pragmatic sense", following J.L. Austin's lead in his discussion of "real". I have not yet had a chance to read what A said about this but will by this weekend. Hacking means, I think, that he does not have much faith in elaborate discussions of a word that does not seem to add anything to one's discussion of anything save in local circumstances when it is used for contrast. Thus, "baseball bat", "baseball glove", "baseball cap" all work using "baseball" to differentiate bats and caps and gloves from being all manner of other possible bats and such, while saying that this is a "real" bat adds nothing to ordinary references to bats unless one needs to mark this bat off from all those mock-up Styrofoam bats, like the fake TV sets and computer monitors one finds in furniture stores. Being a "realist" in these terms is a puzzling thing to be because it suggests that one is for real things but as opposed to what? ' Hacking also likes what he calls the "scientific antirealism" of Comte and van Fraassen, or their old style positivism, which perhaps rejected realism as unnecessary in the fact of positive facts. No; van Fraassen argues famously that scientific theories need not be, and probably cannot be, literal descriptions of the real, but what he calls "empirically adequate" to the realm of available facts. But there are other theories that entail these facts, or are entailed by them. The facts available always says van F under-determine all theories, that is, all sets of facts could entail more than one empirically adequate theory. Hacking then writes that in his book on representing he then added a chapter on pragmatism, which noted that Peirce had believed that theories would eventually converge on the truth, something that H does not believe, because this would suggest that there is one reality upon which scientific theories can converge, or, one right way of knowing the world. Like R, H don't believe this. He does agree with P's idea "the very origin of the conception of reality involves the notion of a COMMUNITY without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase in knowledge." Thus H agrees with this claim that seems inconsistent or could be with P's claim about converging on truth, because to write that "reality" as a conception, as a guiding idea, means an idea developed in and dependent on a community of talkers and agents and this suggest both a dynamic, changing idea of reality as well as one that is shaped not by some external Real but by discussion and testing undertaken by more than one person. It is not entirely clear that Rorty always agrees with this because he also seems to privilege artistic creation by individuals, but the idea of a publicly testable claim is very important in Rorty. DEWEY AND THE SPECTATOR THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE This described all the then current phil science even that which H liked, such as that of van Fraassen, Lakie and Popper. All of them made the mistake of thinking that the real is what we represent in words and thought where H believed that being a realist meant intervening in the world and figuring out what was real in an experimental way rather than theoretically. Even the antirealists seem to have fallen prey to this limitation, and Rorty might have also; let's see. This seems close to Peirce who said that truth was a habit of action, less like Rorty who seems to suggest that the real is what we collectively decide that it is, but without H's emphasis on intervention. So, what we know and what is real is not what we think but what we do; the data from space probe make knowledge and reality, not speculating about what they are. H is afraid that R "praises talk" rather than experimental action. Should we sometimes favor talk? Are there situations in which talk makes more sense than experimental action? The whole issue of entities that cannot in principle be observed but that experiments can manipulate to produce new phenomena is evidence for scientific realism - in the sense that if experiments designed to affect these entities, which present a great challenge to normal realism, can do so, then realism is right so long as we grant that things that are in principle non-observable are unproblematically real. H likes to work in the region of "the intimate dynamics of interaction between theoretical modelling and the experimental creation of phenomena." No theoretical advance w/o experiment, no experiment w/o theory. H writes that he does not care about non-observable theoretical entities because he does not think that it makes any difference to physics whether its theoretical entities "are in general called real or not." What H means is that the reality or irreality of its theory things is irrelevant in almost every case to the conduct of physics. What matters is that experiments using certain descriptions of these objects pan out as expected. Their reality beyond this is moot. Of course they are real in the only relevant ways. H then cites instances where the reality of "particular conjectured entities exist or not." Are certain mental disorders real? Is this even a helpful question? It is asked, of course. 5. Peirce good but not because of  pragmaticism. Good for the altruism that the experimental life requires. Peirce also was brilliant about probability and knew that this account of truth was circular, because we would already have to know what the long term truth was to know that it was the long term truth. Peirce is like the hardware store that carried too much old inventory; P carried too much new inventory. 6. JAMES FUN TO READ Fascinated by kindsand knew how to take a look. 7. Dewey and spectator theory and unreadability and Goffman. 8. Loves Nelson who styled himself an irrealist and was a nominalist. Wanted RELEVANT KINDS not natural kinds. Does not like natural kinds because the term has to cover both biological species and artificial groupings like musical works. Second, natural kinds suggests some sort of priority while the kinds in Q are "habitual or traditional or devised for a new purpose." H thinks relevant does the job much better because it actually names something that matters, as the wholly inaccurate and non-starting "natural" does not. Grue is a bedrock fact.