Scientific Pluralism as a Branch of Millenial Popperianism?
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
Conference: 120 Years Since the Birth of Karl Popper
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
In the last two decades, scientific pluralism has become a household position within the philosophy of science. While scientific pluralist positions come in many flavours, one common feature is that proponents argue that plurality of scientific theories represents an ineliminable characteristic of scientific inquiry, at least in some important respects. A plurality of theories in science is claimed to be desirable, because purportedly (a) it enhances knowledge production and/or (b) it traces with higher fidelity the complexities and indeterminacy of nature. Pluralists will be quick to reject/dismiss Karl Popper?s critical rationalism and similar views, since it invokes a single criterion of theory choice in empirical science (falsification). But since
epistemic relativism is rejected by scientific pluralists, there is an implicit recognition of some principle of demarcation, despite rejecting critical rationalism on the grounds of monism. We shall argue that attempts of scientific pluralists to distance themselves from Popperian views are unsuccessful in several important respects. We build our analysis on the distinction between ?radical? and ?modest? kinds of scientific pluralism (Kellert et al., 2006). We will show that "modest" scientific pluralism, portraying science as aiming for understanding rather than knowledge, for "true enough" instead of truth (Elgin, 2017; Potochnik, 2017), can be further elucidated by comparing these notions to versions of verisimilitude of critical rationalism. Furthermore, we shall argue that ?radical? scientific pluralism, characterised by its advocates' campaigning for the introduction of multiple theories (Feyerabend, 1975; Chang, 2012), can not be intelligibly separated from the methods and aims of falsificationism.
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