Poincaré, with all this virtue, made a serious philosophical mistake. In Poincaré’s own work, this error seems to me to have kept him from several fundamental discoveries in physics. (Howard Stein "Physics and Philosophy Meet: the Strange Case of Poincaré," 1.)
One way to describe this mistake--which I think is related to a wider philosophical tradition--is to say that Poincaré construed the function of theoretical work as essentially administrative--an activity of information-processing. The job of the theorist par excellence..-is to find the simplest and most systematic arrangement for storing scientific information--within the limits defined by those assumptions so entrenched as to function as a priori principles, i.e., as “definitions in disguise.” (Stein, 16)
This mistake is a characteristic one in the empiricist tradition. It involves what seems to me a very odd paralogism. One recognizes--and I cannot say too strongly how right I think this is--that experience is our only touchstone of true information. One observes, with Hume, that the data of experience do not logically entail knowledge of “objective existence” or of the future. In application to the results of science, one draws sophisticated conclusions about the merely hypothetical status of the objects and agencies of scientific theory--e.g., atoms or the ether. But one neglects thereby the earlier insight--the Berkeleyan insight, which precedes Hume--that in a fundamental empiricist epistemological analysis all the objects and agencies of common sense and ordinary life have that same status. In effect, this is to distinguish, whether tacitly or explicitly, between the “reality”--or just persuasiveness--of what the ordinary processes of common sense make of the empirical data, and the reality or persuasiveness of the conclusions reached by the sophisticated processes of science. (Stein 17)
[A]n inadequacy in what may be called Poincaré’s conception of the dialectic of scientific concepts and theories, and of their relation to experiment. And that inadequacy I have earlier associated with what I called a very odd paralogism that recurs in the empiricist tradition: in effect, a double standard of epistemological critique, which occurs with some frequency among empiricist and instrumentalist philosophers of science.....
There is no warrant at all in the instrumentalist view for grading the entities of a theory in degrees of reality or fictitiousness--regarding particles as more real than the ether. This is a double standard that recurs in the empiricist tradition, (Stein, 22, and Stein quoting himself.)
Some over-sensitive historians dislike using judgments like 'mistake' in treating of the past. They mistakenly believe that such judgments are a form of anachronism or hindsight bias. Howard Stein, the greatest living philosophical historian of science,* certainly is not afraid to introduce anachronism when it suits his purposes (including in the quoted passages above). But, that's not what is going on in his judgment that a mistake has been made. Agents, except, perhaps, a divine one, can make mistakes, and worse. Even Homer nods. For, one can specify circumstances in which an agent ought to have known better (given existing best practices, regulations, etc.). Malpractice lawyers make a fine living arguing the details.
Stein anticipates the point and he makes an effort to suggest that the mistake itself is one that is at least internal to the tradition (the "double standard" above). In fact, Stein goes out of his way to ensure that he is not seen as an outsider to the tradition he is criticizing (in his own voice he endorses the shared dogma that "experience is our only touchstone of true information"). He is to be understood as the true(er) empiricist reforming the tradition from within. Given that Stein's diagnosis does not rely on evidence or theories that are unavailable to Poincaré, the mistake would at least, in principle, be visible to Poincaré. Despite the heavy role of historical counterfactuals in all of this, let's stipulate that this is not a bad form of anachronism and available to a true empiricist philosopher-historian.
Now, it is open question if the two inadequacies mentioned by Stein above are really at bottom a single mistake or a family of mistakes. But here I am going to ignore what Stein calls the "dialectic of scientific concepts and theories, and of their relation to experiment." (In part because under the influence of Stein, my youthful self had with an appeal to George Smith's work on Newton's fourth rule of reasoning, charged Berkeley and Hume with that very mistake.)
The purported mistake is still with us. Even if one leaves aside Van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism, quite a few contemporary 'naturalists,' say inspired by David Lewis (recall my discussion of "Elusive Knowledge"), think that so-called Moorean facts are the most epistemically secure and the foundation for other judgments, including scientific ones. The mistake, if it is one, is a natural one to make even if one does not hold Poincaré's views about the role(s) of theory and the theorist: it follows if one combines a fairly robust common sense realism about ordinary objects with even a modest fallibilism about scientific theories. (The epistemic difference leads one to speak of objects in different ontological registers in different domains.) In context, Stein implies that a true empiricist holds a kind of parity thesis: in which scientific and common sense objects have the same epistemic status.
As it happens, I have asserted that there is another way to be a true empiricist, one that finds its home in general philosophy of science (GPOS) and that rests on a quasi-transcendental assumption: if anything counts as knowledge it is fallible science, especially physics (chemistry, biology, whatever), so let's now articulate how this is possible or, more formally, justified. This assumption rejects Stein's parity thesis, and -- when pursued to its limit -- rejects the anthropomorphism that privileges Moorean facts in epistemic affairs. (See also Feser's comment.)
So, must a true empiricist adopt the parity thesis? In addressing Hume's explicit criticism of the parity thesis, Stein writes: "common sense, viewing the actual facts of the development of science, can hardly fail to be impressed." (17) Stein then lists a number of successful scientific theories that (to echo Poincaré) dazzle common sense. The rhetorical force is such that nobody wants to be so reactionary as to reject the results from science. Now, Stein's strategy here is to use the authority of science to settle a dispute within philosophy. (I call this move "Newton's Challenge.")
But does Stein's attack on Hume really end up defending the parity thesis? There are two possible concerns in the vicinity: one is to suggest that Stein's strategy does not automatically halt at the parity thesis, but ultimately undercuts the autonomy of what was once known as the manifest image. The quasi-transcendental assumption has no respect for the parity thesis, after all. Second, a Conservative Humean might insist with a nod to pessimistic meta-induction that ultimately science leaves ordinary things alone. Since Hume's time there have been very different, conflicting successful theories about action at a distance, but ultimately they do not change how we experience smelling a rose or the touch of a hand on one's shoulder.
*Full Disclosure: Howard Stein was my supervisor for five years before he washed his hands off of me.
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