Pragmatic Structural Realism

I'm slowly making my way through Everything Must Go (Ladyman et al 2007), and it's honestly been a breath of fresh air - clarifying, and to some extent answering, several concerns about the philosophy of science that I've been harbouring for some time. It's led me to a version of what Ladyman et al call "ontic structural realism" which I'm tentatively referring to as "pragmatic structural realism". I haven't finished the book yet, so bear with me if this doesn't make any sense, or if I've got something wrong.

Put very simplistically, there is a tension between two broad approaches to science: (constructive) empiricism and (scientific) realism.¹ The former states that we should take our scientific theories to be no more than adequate descriptions of the phenomena under investigation, whilst the latter commits science to the literal truth of its theories, and by extension to the existence of the unobservable entities that they describe. For example, the realist is committed to the actual existence of sub-atomic particles, whilst the empiricist will merely use them as part of the description of a contingently accurate theory, without making any judgement as to whether or not they exist.²

Both approaches appear to be flawed (although in ways more complicated than the following paragraph might suggest). Realism is committed to the existence of entities that are likely to turn out not to exist, or not to exist in quite the way that we thought they did. As science progresses, some of these entities become redundant, implying a level of discontinuity between theories that in practice is not manifested. Empiricism, meanwhile, struggles to explain why these entities have any explanatory power, if in fact they're not real (it also risks descent into total relativism). Ladyman et al present structural realism as almost a dialectical synthesis of these two approaches, but for now I'll simply try and break down my own understanding of it.

Realism: Scientific theories do attempt to describe some underlying reality, although of course they are often wrong. Contra empiricism, they are more than just a conveniently accurate account of observable phenomena.

Structural: However, it is not unobservable entities per se that these theories are committed to, but rather the structural relationships between them (if indeed they exist at all). This structure is what underlies reality, and is what science seeks to describe. Whilst theory change requires abandoning some entities, the structure of the previous theory can be retained. Thus, Ladyman et al describe how both successive theories and theories at different explanatory levels can be related in terms of mathematical structure rather than direct one-to-one mapping of entities and propositions (2007: 118).

Pragmatic: Science is an ongoing process, and so we must recognise the commitments of our current theories as pragmatic place-holders rather than absolute certainties. These theories are our best guess at the structure of reality, and we adapt them as new evidence becomes available. Furthermore, our commitment to structural realism is itself pragmatic, motivated by our belief that it best describes actual scientific (and epistemic) practice.

How is this relevant to the philosophy of mind? Well, for one thing I'm keen to make sure that my understanding of the mind is based on an accurate understanding of science. It's important to ensure that we know what we're on about when try to describe the physical instantiation of the mind. On one level this calls for an understanding of psychology and neuroscience, but on another it means coming to grips, at least in basic sense, with physics. All science essentially boils down to physics of some description, and even if we're quickly going to abstract away from that fundamental level, I think we need to understand it first. Otherwise our entire project is going to rest on faulty foundations.

James Ladyman strikes me as someone who's got a very clear grasp of both contemporary science and the muddled attempts of philosophers to try and make sense of it. His 2010 paper (with Don Ross) on appeals to scientific practice in the extended mind debate really struck home for me, and Everything Must Go is more of the same, although heavy going at times. I'm looking forward to hearing him speak at this conference in a week's time, and I'll maybe report back with some further thoughts after that.

1. This terminology is somewhat misleading, as strictly speaking scientific realists are also empiricists. The difference lies in what they believe to exist, not how they advocate studying it.
2. Complicating things further is the apparent failure of modern philosophy to appreciate the nature of contemporary physics. We tend to talk of physics as though it studies discrete, although very small, objects. According to Ladyman et al this is incorrect, and more importantly philosophically unhelpful.

• Ladyman, J., Ross, D., Spurrett, D. & Collier, J. 2007. Everything Must Go. Oxford: OUP.
• Ross, D & Ladyman, J. 2010 "The Alleged Coupling-Constitution Fallacy and the Mature Sciences." In The Extended Mind, ed. Menary. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The Invisible Self

(by Joe)

"What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don't form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges - at certain times and places - that being which says "I." Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief of the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are."

My copy of the book looks like this.

There is a muddy area where my philosophical research and my political beliefs meet, and the above quote, from The Coming Insurrection (Invisible Committee, 2009: 31-2), sums it up nicely. The Coming Insurrection was written in 2007 by an anonymous collective (calling themselves 'The Invisible Committee') based in France, and it is clearly strongly influenced by the philosophy of that country, most notably the situationist movement of the 1960's, but also continental philosophy more broadly. It is pompous, vague and quite rightly criticised by many in the left-libertarian circles that I inhabit - Django over at Libcom described it as "a huge amount of hyperbole and literary flourish around some wafer-thin central propositions". Nonetheless, the approach towards the self expressed in the above extract appeals to me. 

Put very crudely, I think that the self is an illusion or an abstraction, a "narrative center of gravity" that helps guide our lives and our interactions with others (Dennett, 1992). The mechanisms behind this formation of the self have evolved for a reason, and for pragmatic reasons we shouldn't strive to eliminate it entirely, but to focus on it too much is unhealthy and unhelpful. Such a focus has, since the enlightenment, led to a heightened sense of individualism throughout the western world, one which I think is at the heart of our capitalist, consumerist and ultimately selfish culture. We can overcome this individualism by studying what the self truly is, and perhaps eventually realising that it doesn't truly exist. 

There is an obvious link with Buddhist philosophy here, one which I am currently trying to learn more about. There is also a somewhat less obvious link with embodied cognition, and in particular the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). If the self is an illusion constructed by our mind, and that mind is embedded in, or even extended into, its environment, then the self can be thought of as a product of that environment. This could have quite serious consequences, not only for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, but also for ethics and political philosophy.

Which brings us back to The Coming Insurrection. In the passage I quoted, they describe the sense of "inconsistency" that we feel when we realise that whilst the self is composed of our interactions with things in the world, those things "obviously are not me". The self is invisible, and however hard we try to look for it we can never find it. David Hume expressed a similar feeling when he wrote that "I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception"(A Treatise of Human Nature: Book 1, Part 4, Section 6). We are what we do, and what we do is interact with the world. The focus on the individual over the last few hundred years has clouded that fact, and created an entity, the solid, 'real' self, that does not in fact exist. In coming to understand that who we are is so heavily dependent upon who others are, I hope we might eventually be able to learn to behave more compassionately and co-operatively with other people, as well as with our non-human environment. Satish Kumar embodies this hope in the phrase "You are, therefore I am" (Kumar, 2002), a play on Descarte's "I think, therefore I am", itself a perfect slogan for enlightenment individuality.

There is also an element of the absurd that is recognised, I think, by both Hume and the Invisible Committee. We are confronted with on the one hand an unshakable conviction in the existence of the self, and on the other with convincing evidence that no such thing exists. Similar absurdity can be found in our struggles with free will, moral realism and even scepticism about the external world. In each case a pragmatic route must be found, one that allows us to go on, but at the same time acknowledges the truths that we have learned about the world. In the case of the self, I think that this means accepting that we are a lot closer to the world around us than our privileged, first person view-point makes it seem, and that in order to survive in such a world we must understand and respect our place in it.

There's a lot more I'd like to say about a lot of things here, but I'll save it for future posts. Otherwise we might get complaints about the lack of monkeys!

Here you go.

Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. 1998. "The Extended Mind." Analysis 58: 7-19.

Hume, D. 1739.  A Treatise of Human Nature. Book 1, Part 4, Section 6: Of Personal Identity.

Dennett, D. 1992. "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity."

Invisible Committee, The. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles, LA: Semiotext(e). 

Kumar, S. 2002. You Are Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence. Totnes, UK: Green Books.