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Hacking's Experimental Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David B. Resnik
David B. Resnik*
Affiliation:
University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, 82071, USA
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Extract

Traditional debates about scientific realism tend to focus on issues concerning scientific representation (broadly speaking) and de-emphasize issues concerning scientific intervention. Questions about the relation between theories and the world, the nature of scientific inference, and the structure of scientific explanations have occupied a central place in the realism debate, while questions about experimentation and technology have not. Ian Hacking's experimental realism attempts to reverse this trend by shifting the defense of realism away from representation to intervention. Experimental realism, according to Hacking, does not require us to believe that our theories are true (or approximately true), nor does its defense depend on inference to the best explanation. For Hacking, the strongest proof for realism is that we can manipulate objects: 'So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them, then they are real' (ibid., 23).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , September 1994 , pp. 395 - 411
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1994

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References

1 Ian, Hacking Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983)Google Scholar

2 Wilfrid, Sellars Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press 1962Google Scholar). According to Sellars, ‘to have good reason for holding a theory is ipso facto to have good reason for holding that the entities postulated by the theory exist’ (97).

3 Hacking, ‘Experimentation and Scientific Realism,’ in Leplin, J. ed., Scientific Realism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1984), 154CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hacking aligns himself with Nancy Cartwright, who is also an entity realist. She holds that the theoretical laws of physical theories are false, but that we can have good reasons for believing that entities posited by those theories exist. She also believes, like Hacking, that we can have good reasons for believing that theoretical entities exist when we can causally interact with them. See her book How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983). It should also be noted that by ‘theoretical entity’ Hacking means nothing more than an entity that cannot be observed with the unaided senses, and that a theory, according to Hacking, is not a mere model of the phenomena or a collection of low-level generalizations or phenomenological laws; a theory contains some highlevel generalizations or fundamental laws. Thus Hacking’s account of theories also bears a strong resemblance to Cartwright’s view.

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20 I am grateful to Allan Franklin and an anonymous reviewer from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for helpful suggestions and comments.