Perspectival Realism

“Michela Massimi’s much anticipated book, Perspectival Realism, (henceforth, PR) reveals already from the first chapter the enormous range of research, both scientific and philosophical, which preceded its publication”

“As it is the result of an impressive ERC-funded project that was directed at combining the history and philosophy of science with scientific practice and achievements from different disciplines, we expected nothing less”

“The key aim of PR is to offer an epistemology for scientific realism, which brings together the point-of-viewish nature of representation in science and the realist optimism that, at the end of the day, science succeeds in opening up windows to a perspective-independent reality”

“PR’s project, though invariably interesting and novel, fails to deliver the requested compromise”

“To put the point in the form of a slogan, insofar as it’s realist, PR isn’t perspectival and insofar as it’s perspectival, PR isn’t (necessarily) realist”

“PR subscribes to two natural assumptions (44): the representationalist assumption (‘the claims of knowledge delivered by a scientific model, are true (or approximately true) when the model provides a partial yet accurate representation of the target system’) and the perspectivalist assumption (‘Scientific models offer perspectival representations of relevant aspects of a given target system S [. . . .] Namely, scientific model M1 perspectivally1 represents S as z; but model M2 perspectivally1 represents S as y (where z and y are properties belonging to a ‘horizon of alternatives’))”

“And yet, there is an important tension between those two assumptions. For the perspectivalist assumption is fully consistent with the assignment of incompatible properties to the very same target system from a plurality of perspectival1 representations”

“Admitting this would put realism in jeopardy: realism isn’t compatible with the existence of mutually inconsistent representations of the same target system. Insofar as PR has a realist component, we are confronted with s a bomb that needs to be defused”

“Massimi calls this bomb the ‘problem of inconsistent models’ (PIM), viz., the problem ‘that different models may deliver different, sometimes incompatible, or even inconsistent images for the same phenomenon’ (53)”

“Massimi’s intention is to combine the main insights of three grand philosophical traditions: considering that knowledge cannot be only empirical occurrences (as empiricism advocates), she adopts the realist position that ‘Science is also about theorizing; coming up with hypotheses about unobservable entities that might be responsible for the observable phenomena’ (184), while acknowledging that ‘human beings have no privileged epistemic access to a world of essences, dispositions, potencies, unobservable entities, and so forth’ and emphasising (as constructivism does) that ‘Our scientific knowledge is knowledge of particular epistemic communities at particular times and places’ (185)”

“So, ‘The ontology that best fits perspectival realism has to take into account that scientific knowledge has empirical roots, a modal nature, and is historically and culturally situated’ (186)”

“Given Massimi’s insistence that whatever plays the role of the realist tether of PR—notably, the all-important-to-her-views lawlike dependencies—is perspective-independent, we think it’s fair to say that PR is realist insofar as it’s non-perspectival”

“Conversely, given that the perspectival element of PR introduces features that are consistent with a non-realist account of science (be it subjective or constructivist), we think that insofar as PR is perspectival, it isn’t necessarily realist”