Notes on a complicated relationship: scientific pluralism, epistemic relativism, and stances

Abstract

While scientific pluralism enjoys widespread popularity within the philosophy of science, a related position, epistemic relativism, does not have much traction. Defenders of scientific pluralism, however, dread the question of whether scientific pluralism entails epistemic relativism. It is often argued that if a scientific pluralist accepts epistemic relativism, she will be unable to pass judgment because she believes that “anything goes”. In this article, I will show this concern to be unnecessary. I will also argue that common strategies to differentiate relativism and pluralism fail. Building upon this analysis, I will propose a new way of looking at both positions’ relations. This article aims to understand what explains the friction between scientific pluralism and epistemic relativism. I will demonstrate that conceptualizing both epistemic relativism and scientific pluralism as “stances” sheds better light on their relation and demonstrates that it is, in principle, possible to support both positions at the same time. Preferred policies and levels of analysis, however, cause friction in practice.

Ludwik Fleck’s reasonable relativism about science

“…Baghramian and Coliva (2020, p. 10) hold that equal validity follows as a logical consequence from accepting non-absolutism and non-neutrality. Kusch and others disagree, arguing that accepting non-neutrality entails that different frameworks cannot be neutrally evaluated, whilst accepting equal validity entails that frameworks have been neutrally evaluated and found to be equally good (Ashton, 2020;Kusch, 2019b;Veigl, 2021). 1 Far from entailing equal validity, these scholars argue that non-neutrality is incompatible with equal validity.…”

“…In both the philosophy of science and the philosophy of medicine, philosophers are searching for a middle-way account of science that rejects traditional aspirations of realism and objectivity, whilst avoiding the pitfalls associated with relativism and constructivism (Chang, 2016;Gagné-Julien, 2021;Giere, 2006;Kusch, 2020b;Longino, 2002;Veigl, 2021). On the traditional account of science, the objects and facts described are understood to be independent of human culture, and part of the world-initself (Gagné-Julien, 2021).…”

Stance Pluralism, Scientology, and the Problem of Relativism

“…Amanda Bryant has argued convincingly that, on Chakravartty's account, the "minimal standard of rationality is [itself] not beyond the reach of epistemic stances but vulnerable -like everything elseto their differential influence" (2021, p. 8). That is, rationality should be a stance-relative, rather than a stance-neutral constraint, and CSP therefore collapses into what Bryant calls "epistemic anarchy" or what I have called unbridled relativism (see also Baumann, 2011;Surovell, 2019;Kusch, 2020;Veigl, 2020 for similar arguments against van Fraassen's Stance Empiricism). Chakravartty recognises that limiting the constraint imposed by rationality to internal coherence opens the door to the possibility that more than one stance will count as rational… [A] question inevitably comes to the fore about whether this inherently permissive constraint is strong enough to rule out epistemically pathological stances (2017, p. 224).…”

“…Instead, it is a value, andlike other valuesonly binding for those stances where it serves as a suppositional constraint. Kusch concludes that stance pluralism is, in fact, a form of relativism unconstrained by anything stance-extrinsic (see also Veigl, 2020;Bryant, 2021;Psillos, 2021;Slater, 2021). Although Kusch is targeting van Fraassen, it should be obvious how his argument transfers to CSP.…”

Scientific Pluralism in Practice: Responses to Anomaly in the Sciences

“…SP comes in many different flavors, such as metaphysical vs. epistemological SP (Cartwright 1999;Dupré 1993;Longino 2006); normative, evaluative, or descriptive SP (Chang 2012;Dupré 1993); intra-or interdisciplinary SP (Galison and Stump 1996); and integrative vs. non-integrative SP (Mitchell 2002;Chang 2012), to name a few. While SP is often not explicitly defined, I formulated these three criteria elsewhere as a common ground for card-carrying scientific pluralists in the recent literature (Veigl 2021):…”