Abstract
Instrumental realism is a type of scientific realism which emphasizes the importance of scientific instruments for the acquisition of scientific knowledge. According to instrumental realism, we have epistemic access to reality but this access is often indirect, mediated by means of instruments. The development of science is accompanied by the introduction of new instruments which open up access to phenomena to which we had formerly lacked epistemic access. The knowledge gained by means of the new instruments usually results in the refinement of our theories. Nevertheless, sometimes the new experimental results contradict our theories and force us to engage in their correction. The results obtained by means of particular instruments are integrated, or synthesized, into a unified instrumental, linguistic and theoretical practice. We can distinguish four kinds of such synthesis – instrumental, relational, compositional and deductive. All four kinds of synthesis require idealization, which in instrumental realism is understood to be a linguistic reduction.
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Notes
- 1.
Frege was one of the founders of formal logic. I believe that an analogous formalization is taking place now in epistemology. The rejection of psychologism is thus an important component of formal epistemology.
- 2.
In the case of sensory experience, sensory organs such as the eye, ear or tactile receptors play an important role. These organs can be understood as “protein instruments”, and so instrumental realism can be considered a generalization of classical empiricism, in which, in addition to the protein instruments with which evolution has equipped us, we also use instruments composed of metal, glass and other materials, instruments that were created in the process of technical development. It is important to realize that the act of epistemic contact is always composed of a bodily component (formed by an event in the physical world) and a cognitive component (formed by an event in the mind of the knowing subject). In science, more and more aspects of epistemic contact are gradually being shifted from the cognitive component to the bodily component.
- 3.
We are faced with the dilemma of whether these additional aspects, which appear in the painting due to the stabilization of epistemic contact, should be attributed to the contact itself, and thus to claim that we see them immediately (and insist that was the case for centuries before the discovery of perspective, only no one noticed), or we should consider them as phenomena that are constituted only by the stabilization of epistemic contact (and thus did not exist before the Renaissance, so there was nothing to notice). In the case of perspective, we tend to prefer the first interpretation and to claim that, for example, the parallels running into the depths of space converged even before the Renaissance, only no one noticed. However, with more sophisticated ways of stabilizing epistemic contact, this is no longer so clear-cut. Was the elliptical shape of the orbits of the planets of the solar system a fact for pre-Copernican astronomy as well, but no one noticed it before Kepler, or did the elliptical shape of the orbits arise only within the heliocentric system? Instrumental realism adheres to scientific realism, and thus considers the elliptical shape of orbits to be an objective feature of reality, to which, however, we have gained an epistemic access only by means of Copernican astronomy.
- 4.
The concept of space can be added to the point of view, the horizon and the relation of identity as a fourth aspect, accompanying the stabilization of epistemic contact. In the History of Geometry and the Development of the Form of its Language (Kvasz, 1998) I relate these aspects to Wittgenstein’s notion of the pictorial form from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1921). If this interpretation is correct, Wittgenstein’s notion of the pictorial form is actually a description of the stabilization of epistemic contact.
- 5.
The concept of sectorial velocity is the first step on the path to the concept of angular momentum. This concept is therefore related to the concept of space, a concept that was born of the stabilization of epistemic contact in painting. In analytic mechanics it can be shown that the law of conservation of angular momentum is related to the invariance of space with respect to rotations.
- 6.
In the case of Hamiltonian mechanics, the term ‘stabilization of epistemic contact’ obtains an almost literal meaning, because by moving from a six-dimensional configuration space to a twelve-dimensional phase space, velocity is turned into a coordinate, i.e. in the representation of the mechanical system it is static, i.e. stable.
- 7.
The Copernican system is formulated from the point of view of an observer motionless with respect to the Sun, even if such a point of view cannot really be taken, because a motionless observer would fall towards the Sun.
- 8.
The sentences of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are numbered using a decimal classification system, whereby sentence TLP 2.2 comments on sentence TPL 2, just as sentence TLP 2.172 comments on sentence TLP 2.17. This numbering makes searching the Tractatus very easy. Therefore, it is customary to refer to the sentences of the Tractatus by their number, and not (as per other books) by page number.
- 9.
These constants are not entirely determined by nature; conventions are also involved. We propose, therefore, to consider the constants by means of which the empirical laws are formulated as another aspect of the pictorial form. Thus, we propose that one consider the empirical law as a fact about the world and the relevant constant as an aspect of the pictorial form. The constant is displayed by the empirical law. Its numerical value has no factual significance, just like the position of the horizon in a painting does not. The value of a constant depends on the choice of units for the individual quantities. On the one hand, a constant contributes to the stabilization of the epistemic contact with reality; yet on the other hand, it relates several quantities, and therefore appears only in a complex instrumental practice, in which several scientific instruments work side by side. The constants are used to interconnect local instrumental practices associated with these individual devices.
- 10.
An instrumental practice connected to a physical discipline can be defined as a system of measuring devices that allows the measuring of all the quantities necessary for the identification of the state of the physical system studied by the particular discipline. However, this is not the right place for such a definition because thus far we have neither defined the concept of the state of a physical system nor shown from where it comes. It comes from idealization, so we first have to address this notion in more detail.
- 11.
As regards the notion of the pictorial form, I violated Wittgenstein’s intention in introducing this notion. I narrowed the pictorial form to particular disciplines such as geometry and algebra and introduced a specific pictorial form for each of them, having previously interpreted the history of these disciplines as the development of their pictorial form in (Kvasz, 1998, 2006, 2011), whereas Wittgenstein intended the concept of pictorial form as a monolithic concept, so he would probably reject both narrowing it down to individual disciplines and the idea that the pictorial form changes over time and that the historical development of geometry or algebra is driven by the development of the pictorial form. Nevertheless, I am convinced that what I offered in those three papers is a correct description of their development. It seems that as regards the notion of a language game the deviation of my use of this notion from Wittgenstein’s intended use is even sharper. I will use the notion of a language game for understanding rather than criticizing idealization.
- 12.
In geometry, the compositional synthesis is manifested in the postulates, which are rules for constructions and the deductive synthesis is manifested in the axioms, which are rules for conducting proofs. In geometry we idealize, for instance, the intersection of two lines for the same reason as in mechanics we idealize the state, namely that in this way they can be part of further steps of compositional and deductive synthesis.
- 13.
Quantum mechanics intervened in this problem through the uncertainty principle but physicists found an elegant answer when they attributed the sharpness and unambiguity, i.e. idealization, to the state represented by the wave function, and attributed all the uncertainty to the act of measurement.
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Acknowledgement
I express my acknowledgement of the generous support of the Formal Epistemology – the Future Synthesis project, within the framework of the Praemium Academicum program of the Czech Academy of Sciences. I would like to thank Michael Pockley whose comments helped to clarify several arguments.
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Kvasz, L. (2022). Instrumental Realism – A New Start for the Philosophy of Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science. In: Gonzalez, W.J. (eds) Current Trends in Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library, vol 462. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01315-7_8
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