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European Journal for Philosophy ofScience ISSN 1879-4912 Euro Jnl Phil SciDOI 10.1007/s13194-014-0082-9

Pliability and resistance: Feyerabendianinsights into sophisticated realism

Luca Tambolo

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ORIGINAL PAPER IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Pliability and resistance: Feyerabendian insightsinto sophisticated realism

Luca Tambolo

Received: 3 September 2013 /Accepted: 1 February 2014# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract In this paper we focus on two claims, put forward by Feyerabend in his laterwritings (especially in Conquest of Abundance, 1999a), which constitute the metaphys-ical core of his view of scientific inquiry. The first, that we call the pliability thesis, isthe claim that the world can be described by indefinitely many conceptual systems,none of them enjoying a privileged status. The second, that we call the resistance thesis,is the claim that the pliability of the world is limited, i.e., not all the different conceptualsystems that can be used to describe the world will be equally successful: the worldoffers resistance to some attempts to describe it. We show that, in spite of the laterFeyerabend’s notorious antirealist leanings, the pliability thesis is fully compatible witha robustly realist view of science, and we suggest that, surprisingly, Feyerabend’sinsights concerning the limited pliability of the world turn out to be those of a potentialally of sophisticated versions of scientific realism.

Keywords Paul Feyerabend . Pliability thesis . Resistance thesis . Ilkka Niiniluoto .

Sophisticated realism

1 Introduction

In his later writings, and most notably in Conquest of Abundance (1999a), Feyerabendstruggles to reach a comfortable middle ground between relativism, on the one hand,and realism, on the other hand. Accordingly, while trying to distance himself from therelativism that he embraced, for instance, in Science in a Free Society (1978), hevociferously rails against realism. In this paper we shall focus on Feyerabend’s critiqueof realism, and in particular on two claims concerning the limited pliability of the worldthat constitute the metaphysical core of his alternative view of scientific inquiry. Thefirst, that we shall call the pliability thesis, is the claim that the world can be describedby indefinitely many conceptual systems, none of them enjoying a privileged status.The second, that we shall call the resistance thesis, is the claim that the pliability of the

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L. Tambolo (*)Department of Humanistic Studies, University of Trieste, Via Casona, 7, 40043 Marzabotto, Italye-mail: ltambolo@gmail.com

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world is limited, i.e., not all the different conceptual systems that can be used to describethe world will be equally successful: the world offers resistance to some attempts todescribe it. We shall show that, in spite of the later Feyerabend’s notorious antirealistleanings, the pliability thesis is entirely compatible with a robustly realist view ofscience, and we shall suggest that, surprisingly, Feyerabend’s insights concerning thelimited pliability of the world turn out to be those of a potential ally of realism.

Feyerabend deploys the pliability thesis and the resistance thesis within the contextof a sustained attack against a view of science to which he refers as “realism,” most ofthe times without further qualifications, but which can be better labeled “naïve real-ism,” or “metaphysical realism.” In fact, as the later Feyerabend understands it, realismis the view that the aim of inquiry is to discover the Only True Theory, providing thecorrect, complete description of reality, and that science is the best means to achievesuch an aim. Feyerabend, on his part, has been aptly characterized as a philosopherarguing that science “doesn’t disclose a single, coherent description of the world, but aplurality of overlapping perspectives […] which are all perspectives on the same world,but don’t add up to an absolute view of the world” (Brown 2009, p. 219); or to put itdifferently, that although reality is “amenable to representation by multiple concepts ortheories […] none of these do or can provide a true or absolute account of that reality”(Kidd 2012, p. 375).

As we shall suggest, it is the above naïve version of scientific realism thatFeyerabend attacks when, in his later writings, he criticizes what he refers to as“realism,” implying that his criticisms of such doctrine, heavily relying of the pliabilitythesis, affect any version of scientific realism. But as we shall argue, and contrary towhat Feyerabend seemed to believe, a realist may well embrace the pliability thesis,provided that one is a sophisticated realist.

Since sophisticated realism comes in many versions, in this paper we shall notventure to propose a catch-all definition of it. Rather, some features typically exhibitedby sophisticated versions of realism will be indicated in Section 4. As it will turn out, arealist view of science is generally the more sophisticated, the farther it is from realismas the later Feyerabend understands it—think, for instance, of the versions of realismdefended by Psillos (1999), Niiniluoto (1999), Kuipers (2000), and Giere (2006)—;and what is more important, a sophisticated realist has no need to assume the existenceof a privileged conceptual system to describe the world.

We shall proceed as follows. In Section 2, Feyerabend’s reconstruction of the rise ofrealism and his criticism of such doctrine—especially as it is carried on in theposthumous book Conquest of Abundance (1999a)—will be outlined. In Section 3Feyerabend’s alternative to realism, revolving around the pliability thesis and theresistance thesis, will be introduced. It will be suggested that, although Feyerabendseemed not to appreciate it, one may well be a scientific realist and embrace his insightsconcerning the limited pliability of the world. In Section 4 a prominent example ofsophisticated realism—Niiniluoto’s critical scientific realism—will be discussed. It willbe shown that Niiniluoto, who defends a view of science based on the idea that themain cognitive aim of scientific inquiry is approximation to the truth (i.e., the choice oftheories with a high degree of verisimilitude or truthlikeness), embraces both thepliability thesis and the resistance thesis, although in his writings, he does not use theexpressions “pliability thesis” and “resistance thesis.” In Section 5, some brief con-cluding remarks will be offered.

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2 The later Feyerabend against realism

Many of Feyerabend’s views changed significantly, sometimes dramatically, over time,and this certainly holds also for his attitude towards scientific realism—an issue onwhich interpreters strongly disagree, especially concerning his output between the1950s and, more or less, the mid-1970s (see, e.g., Preston 1997, Ch. 4; Farrell 2003,Ch. 4; Oberheim 2006, Ch. 6). Opinions differ also concerning whether the—compar-atively, much less studied—Feyerabend of the late 1980s and early 1990s, who hadclearly antirealist leanings, and which will be the focus of our attention here, can be bestcharacterized as a social constructivist (Preston 2000 [1998]), as a follower of thephysicist Niels Bohr (Munévar 2002; Farrell 2003), or as a critic of scientific realismacting under the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Kidd 2012).1 In anycase, there is a general consensus among interpreters that the later Feyerabend was, asGonzalo Munévar put it, a philosopher trying to articulate a “reasonable alternative”(2002, p. 520) both to relativism and to realism—and we must emphasize, realism as heconceived it, namely, a naïve version of scientific realism.

Admittedly, our proposal to read in a realist-friendly way Feyerabend’s thesesconcerning the limited pliability of the world runs counter to his openly declaredantirealist intentions. In fact, as is well-known, in Farewell to Reason (1987), inThree Dialogues on Knowledge (1991), and in his posthumous, unfinished Conquestof Abundance (1999a), Feyerabend forcefully argues against a doctrine to which herefers as “realism.” But as anticipated, our focus here will be a theoretical, and not anexegetical, issue. In other words, although we shall devote quite some space to whatFeyerabend wrote on the issue of scientific realism, we will not try to offer an overallcharacterization of his later philosophy. Rather, we shall investigate the questionwhether his insights concerning the limited pliability of the world can be put into theservice of a realist view of science—and we shall answer this question in the positive.

As mentioned in Section 1, the later Feyerabend takes realism to be the view that theaim of inquiry is to discover the Only True Theory, providing the correct, completedescription of reality, and that science is the best means to achieve such an aim. Nowonder that the later Feyerabend attacks this view, since throughout all of his writingshe passionately advocated theoretical pluralism: as he put it in his early paper “How tobe a good empiricist,” pluralism “must not be regarded as a preliminary stage ofknowledge which will at some time in the future be replaced by the Only TrueTheory. Theoretical pluralism is assumed to be an essential feature of all knowledgethat claims to be objective” (1999b [1963], p. 80). In different phases of his career,Feyerabend praised different philosophers (mainly Popper until the mid-1960s, mainlyStuart Mill from the mid-1960s onwards) as eminent champions of criticism and of theproliferation of alternatives to the established point of view. In the early 1960s, he alsoput forward a famous technical argument for theoretical pluralism. In rough outline theargument—repeatedly defended by Feyerabend (for instance, in 1962, 1999b [1963],1968, and 1999c [1972])—runs as follows: in order to severely test a currently acceptedtheory T, it is not enough to consider the empirical consequences of T and the availableevidence, since there are some facts, which may refute T, that can be discovered only bydeploying at least one alternative T′ to T; therefore, at any given time, alternatives to the

1 A brief account of these diverging interpretations will be offered in Section 3.

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currently accepted theory ought to proliferate.2 In sum, nothing could be farther fromthe spirit of his philosophy than the kind of theoretical monism that goes hand in handwith naïve realism.

The above argument for pluralism continues to feature prominently in Feyerabend’sworks until the end of his career (see, e.g., 1993, pp. 20–23). In his later writings,however, the attack against realism tends to be phrased in different and, as it were, morebroad, terms.

Consider, for instance, how the issue is approached in the opening pages ofConquest of Abundance (1999a). The world in which we live, Feyerabend claims, “isabundant beyond our wildest imagination,” since it contains such diverse kinds ofthings as “trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there arewars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies” (ibid.,p. 3). Feyerabend immediately adds that our minds are affected by only “a tiny fractionof such abundance” (ibid.), and that this is a blessing, since it would be simplyimpossible, both on a theoretical and on a practical level, to handle such an enormousvariety. In order for the world to be a place that humans can make sense of, some partsof it—indeed, the vast majority of these parts—need to be cut off. By using abstrac-tions, which “remove the particulars that distinguish an object from another,” andexperiments, which “create an artificial and somewhat impoverished environmentand explore its peculiarities” (ibid., p. 5), the abundance of the world is reduced.What remains is then used as the starting point to build a depleted version of the world,which is referred to as “reality”—a realm whose unchanging regularities (called the“laws of nature”) scientific inquiry is in charge of discovering.

Feyerabend hastens to acknowledge that such a procedure has obvious cognitive andpractical advantages, and that the notion of reality “makes excellent sense when appliedwith discretion and in the appropriate context” (ibid., p. 9). Unfortunately however, hecomplains, the temptation soon arises, on the part of intellectuals, to act as if only thatpart of the world which is called “reality” actually existed and mattered. Indeed,according to Feyerabend, the whole history of Western civilization can be seen as thetriumph of the idea that the world consists of two parts: “a hidden and partly distortedreal world and a concealing and disturbing veil around it” (ibid., p. 5).

In Conquest of Abundance, as well as in other writings dating back to the last years ofFeyerabend’s life (see, e.g., 1987, 1991, and the lectures published in 2011), various linesof argument against realism are deployed; at least three are worth briefly mentioning here.

First of all, Feyerabend denies the unity of science. In his view, not only theexistence of a single Scientific Method, but also the very “idea of a coherent ‘bodyof scientific knowledge’ is a chimera” (1999a, p. 232): what is referred to, especially bychampions of realism, as “science,” is not a monolith but, rather, a sort of patchworkcontaining many diverse research traditions and approaches. Such terms as “science,”Feyerabend argues, are just “temporary collecting bags containing a great variety ofproducts, some excellent, others rotten” (ibid.). An examination of the history and ofthe current practice of the sciences shows that there is nothing like a “single scientificworldview” (ibid., p. 148), and that a juxtaposition of “different trends with differentresearch philosophies” (ibid., p. 151) lies behind an alleged unity.

2 For discussions of the argument, and of the relevant literature, see e.g. Preston (1997), Ch. 7, and Farrell(2003), Ch. 5. On Feyerabend’s pluralism, see especially Lloyd (2000 [1997]).

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Secondly, Feyerabend questions the consequences that defenders of realism drawfrom the success of science. That scientific theories often have impressive “empiricalbacking” is, Feyerabend acknowledges, “a historical fact, not a philosophical position”(ibid., p. 191). Nevertheless, he argues, the empirical success of theories may well beviewed, not as evidence of the superiority of scientific theorizing over other approachesto the investigation of the world, but rather, as the consequence of “having followed apath of least resistance” (ibid., p. 142). Indeed, he claims, experimental results mayseem to be evidence for the superiority of science only if one neglects that while somekinds of objects lend themselves to being precisely measured, others simply do not:“Gods cannot be captured by experiment, matter can” (ibid.). Therefore the argument tothe effect that, given the empirical success of scientific theories, science is the bestmeans to describe the so-called “reality” allegedly underlying deceiving appearances, isfar from compelling.

Thirdly, and consequently, Feyerabend refuses to take science as a measuring stickof the adequacy of other approaches to the investigation of the world. If empiricalsuccess cannot be taken as evidence of the excellence of the allegedly unified enterprisecalled “science,” “then there is no reason why [one] should disregard what happensoutside of it” (ibid., p. 195). Indeed, Feyerabend argues, by using a different criterion ofsuccess, according to which a given research tradition or a given culture is successfulinsofar as it enables its members “to live a moderately rich and fulfilling life,” one caneasily realize that “non-scientific notions, too, receive a response from Nature” (ibid.),and that the world is much more complex than the champions of realism would want usto believe. Therefore, Feyerabend insists, only neutral criteria of success—neutral, thatis, with respect to the scientific/non-scientific divide—allow one to fairly assessdifferent ways to study the world.

Feyerabend’s reconstruction of the rise of realism and his criticism of such doctrinehave been seriously challenged, among others, by some reviewers of Conquest ofAbundance (see, e.g., Clark 2002; Downes 2002). In any case, in the present section wedid not aim at assessing Feyerabend’s criticism of realism; our goal has been, rather, toset the stage for the discussion of his alternative view of science, which will be dealtwith in Section 3.

3 Pliability and resistance: Feyerabend’s alternative to realism

Feyerabend’s alternative to realism can be best introduced by considering the essay“Realism and the Historicity of Knowledge,” originally published in 1989 and reprintedin Conquest of Abundance, in which he forcefully argues against what he calls the“separability assumption” (1999a, p. 133). According to this assumption—whichFeyerabend treats as a basic tenet of realism—one can separate the results producedby inquiry from the methods that produce such results: although what in a certainmoment is considered as knowledge is the outcome of contingent historical develop-ments, the discovered entities or processes exist independently of the circumstances oftheir discovery. Feyerabend formulates the separability assumption as follows:

what has been found in [a] idiosyncratic and culture-dependent way (and is thereforeformulated and explained in idiosyncratic, ad hoc, and culture-dependent terms)

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exists independently of the circumstances of its discovery. In other words, we cancut the way from the result without losing the result (Feyerabend 1999a, p. 133).

In light of his criticisms of realism, and especially of the claim that science ought notto be taken as the measuring stick of adequacy of other ways of investigating the world,it comes as no surprise that Feyerabend attacks the separability assumption. The mainproblem with it, he complains, is that the separability assumption leads to neglect thatscientists are “sculptors of reality” (ibid, p. 144): not unlike artists, who shape theirmaterial guided by their inspiration and worldview, scientists “act causally upon theworld” (ibid.) with experiments, guided by their theories. Moreover, experimenting isalways accompanied by the choice of a language that allegedly describes the world as itis: scientists “create semantic conditions” (ibid.) suggesting that their preferred theoryexhibits a perfect fit with reality. According to Feyerabend, the causal action upon theworld and the creation of semantic conditions on the part of scientists are aspects of oneand the same process: the creation of the so-called “reality” underlying deceivingappearances. It is by means of such combination of causal and semantic action thatscientists—as Feyerabend puts it in an extremely cursory reconstruction—have beenable “to manufacture, first, metaphysical atoms, then, crude physical atoms, and,finally, complex systems of elementary particles out of a material that did not containthese elements but could be shaped into them” (ibid.).

Sometimes scientists are so successful that a certain story concerning how the worldis—deceptively—seems to be the only possible one. But contrary to what the cham-pions of realism claim (at least, according to Feyerabend’s portrayal of the typicalrealist attitude), this can never be the case: as a history characterized by variousrevolutionary theory-changes illustrates, the material that scientists handle “is morepliable than is commonly assumed” (ibid., p. 145). According to Feyerabend, theboundaries between the results of an investigation of the world, on the one hand, andthe circumstances in which such results have been achieved, on the other hand, aremuch fuzzier than the separability assumption would lead us to believe. Therefore,based on what we called the pliability thesis (the claim that there are indefinitely manyconceptual systems to describe the world, none of them enjoying a privileged status),Feyerabend rejects the separability assumption.

The pliability thesis, and the rejection of the separability assumption that followsfrom it, are fully consonant with Feyerabend’s long-term passionate advocacy oftheoretical pluralism. Indeed, the overall tone of Feyerabend’s later writings is evenmore pluralistic than ever, and the plea for the proliferation of alternatives is pushed tothe extreme. At times, Feyerabend writes as if there were no limits to the constructionsthat scientists can impose upon the world. For instance, in insisting that the pliablematerial that they have in their hands can be shaped into very different kinds of things,he claims: “molding [this material] in one way […], we get elementary particles;proceeding in another, we get a nature that is alive and full of Gods” (ibid.).

With reference to this and other similar remarks, John Preston has argued that thelater Feyerabend embraced an untenable metaphysical stance, opposed to that under-lying scientific realism, which is best described as social-constructivist. According tosuch stance, the aim of scientific inquiry is not to discover what one may call the“inherent structure” of the world but, rather, to ascertain how nature—or “Being,” asthe later Feyerabend often referred to it—reacts to different approaches. Feyerabend’s

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Being, considered as a whole, is “a completely unknowable ‘thing-in-itself,’ a some-thing of which nothing can be said” (Preston 2000 [1998], p. 94).

Concerning the doctrine of the ineffability of Being, Ian James Kidd has suggestedthat it must be viewed as the result of the influence, on Feyerabend, of the negativetheology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose ideas Feyerabend deployed inorder to criticize “the claim that scientific inquiries can provide ‘absolute’ knowledge ofobjective reality” (Kidd 2012, p. 366). According to Pseudo-Dionysius, human con-cepts and language are unfit to fully capture the ultimate nature of God, since theyapply only to the limited entities (“beings”) created by God (“Being”). Nevertheless,the concepts that we use to speak of God (the “divine names”) reflect, albeit in a partialand imperfect way, some aspects of Him, and therefore are a means to approach God,which, however, cannot be reached. Analogously, Kidd argues, Feyerabend believedthat the sciences cannot provide us with knowledge of the “ultimate nature” of reality:they can offer, at best, some “evidence of how Being reacts when approached indifferent ways” (Feyerabend 1999a, p. 213).

Feyerabend’s emphasis on the different outcomes that are obtained, depending onthe way in which the world is approached, has led Robert Farrell to define him a“process realist” deeply influenced by Niels Bohr’s view that, in the case of atomicphenomena, “no sharp separation can be made between an independent behavior of theobjects and their interaction with measuring instruments which define the referenceframe” (Bohr, quoted in Farrell 2003, p. 119). According to Farrell, the laterFeyerabend generalized such insight to the whole of scientific inquiry, which doesnot discover how the world is in itself, but only how it manifests itself when it isinvestigated in a certain way: “various natural phenomena and natural, physical laws,only emerge once highly specific circumstances are realized” (ibid., p. 125).3

Whether the metaphysical outlook revolving around the pliability thesis can be bestclassified as a form of social constructivism, as a reprise of Neoplatonist themes, or asan alternative to realism based on Bohr’s ideas, will not be our concern here. For ourpresent purposes, what matters is that the later Feyerabend supplemented his earlierarguments for the proliferation of theories with a metaphysics that emphasizes themultifarious, exceedingly abundant character of the world, and which requires theadoption of a radical form of pluralism.

Yet, besides the pliability thesis, Feyerabend’s alternative to realism includes asecond component, that we called the resistance thesis. According to the resistancethesis, not all the conceptual systems that one may use for the description of the worldwill be equally successful: the pliability of the material that scientists handle,Feyerabend—sometimes begrudgingly—admits, is not without a limit. Such material“must be approached in the right way,” since it “offers resistance,” and some concep-tual systems just do not manage to make contact with the world: they “find no point ofattack in it and simply collapse” (1999a, p. 145).

It must be noted that Feyerabend is never particularly forthcoming, when it comes toexactly characterizing the resistance that, sometimes, the world opposes to our cogni-tive efforts. As we have seen, the doctrine of the ineffability of reality concerns, first of

3 Along similar lines, Munévar has argued that the later Feyerabend defended a position “similar to Bohr’s:experiments, ideas, and models strongly interfere with nature, but they do not reveal how nature is indepen-dently of that interference—they only reveal how nature responds to that interference” (Munévar 2002, p. 520).

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all, Being as a whole: we can shed light on some aspects, regions, or niches, of theworld, but only at the price of overshadowing others. And secondly, when Beingresponds positively to our attempts to describe it with a certain conceptual system,we do gain some insight concerning aspects, regions, or niches, of the world, but this isit: the attainment of something like knowledge of the “ultimate nature” of those aspects,regions, or niches, is simply beyond our reach. However, in view of the exceedinglyabundant character of the world, how is the failure of some attempts to describe it to bedealt with? Can resistance be viewed as something due to temporary (perhaps techno-logical) limitations, that can be overcome with time, patience, and ingenuity? Or is it asign of the fact that a certain way to describe the world is forever doomed to failure? Ina passage of Conquest of Abundance in which Feyerabend is trying to correct theimpression that he is a relativist, he seems to opt for the latter alternative:

not all approaches to “reality” are successful. Like unfit mutations, some ap-proaches linger for a while—their agents suffer, many die—and then disappear.Thus the mere existence of a society with certain ways of behaving and certaincriteria of judging what has been achieved is not sufficient for establishing amanifest reality; what is also needed is that God, or Being, or Basic Reality reactsin a positive way (ibid., p. 215).

It is not immediately clear how such a view can be reconciled with Feyerabend’slong-term commitment to the importance of tenacity. As early as 1965, he is adamant inclaiming that his principle of proliferation, besides recommending the invention ofalternatives to the established view, “prevents the elimination of older theories whichhave been refuted” (1981 [1965], p. 107). In fact, Feyerabend argues, such cases as thehistory of heliocentrism and of atomism show how “antediluvian, preposterous ideas[…] may yet be turned against ‘modern’ views and may even succeed in overthrowingthem” (ibid., p. 108). History, Feyerabend claims, shows that “things can never beregarded as settled,” and that ruling out the “possibility of a ‘criticism from the past’”(ibid.) would mean to deprive ourselves of an extremely precious resource. Althoughwith a slightly different phrasing, the point is reiterated until in the third edition ofAgainst Method: “Nothing is ever settled, no view can ever be omitted from acomprehensive account” (1993, p. 21). In sum, that genuine knowledge requires theretention of discredited theories, and that progress can be attained by reviving ideaspreviously thrown into the dustbin of history, are views repeatedly advocated byFeyerabend, but prima facie at least, they do not chime well with the resistance thesis.

One can only guess how Feyerabend would have developed his views concerningthe limited pliability of the world, had he lived long enough to complete the manuscriptof Conquest of Abundance. What is certain is that in proposing his alternative torealism, Feyerabend denies that he is aiming at introducing a new theory of knowledge:“Taking the historical character of knowledge seriously means rejecting any suchattempt” (1999a, p. 145). According to Feyerabend one can, at most, “tell manyinteresting stories” (ibid.) concerning the results of the complex interplay betweenthe world and the humans that try to investigate it.

In any case, the later Feyerabend is clearly committed to defending a set of relatedviews—such as the thesis of the disunity of science introduced in Section 2—that,taken together, provide us with an image of science which aims at being a rival both to

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relativism and to the naïve version of realism that he attacks. An assessment of such animage is beyond the scope of the present paper. For our current purposes, what isimportant to note is that Feyerabend’s critique of realism, in which the pliability thesisplays a central role, does not apply to all versions of scientific realism. Quite on thecontrary, the pliability thesis is in fact embraced by defenders of sophisticated realism;therefore, as we shall argue in Section 4, Feyerabend’s insights concerning the limitedpliability of the world turn out to be those of a potential ally of sophisticated scientificrealism.

4 Sophisticated realism and the limited pliability of the world

We started this paper by contrasting realism as the later Feyerabend understands it, onthe one hand, with sophisticated realism, on the other hand. We have discussed at somelength both Feyerabend’s criticism of naïve realism (Section 2) and his alternative viewof science (Section 3). In order to make the case for the claim that, in spite ofFeyerabend’s antirealist leanings, his insights concerning the limited pliability of theworld are those of a potential ally of sophisticated scientific realism, we now need tosay something more on sophisticated realism—to which, up to this point, we onlyalluded.

There are probably as many versions of scientific realism around as there are authorsdiscussing the issue. Realism can nevertheless be defined, at the most general level, as“a positive epistemic attitude towards the content of our best theories and models,recommending belief in both observable and unobservable aspects of the worlddescribed by the sciences” (Chakravartty 2011). More specifically, realism is standardlytaken to be a package including (appropriately qualified versions of) the following threetheses. First, there is the metaphysical (or ontological) thesis that the world whichscientific theories aim at describing exist independently of our minds. Secondly, there isthe semantic thesis that scientific theories are attempts to describe the world as it is, andnot just to systematize observations, and therefore, the claims that they makeconcerning the world must be taken literally, as having truth values. Thirdly, there isthe epistemological thesis that mature, predictively successful theories provide us withapproximately true descriptions of the world.4

In view of the many ways in which the three above theses have been qualified in theliterature, here we shall not venture to propose a catch-all definition of sophisticatedrealism. Rather, we shall rest content with indicating some features typically exhibitedby sophisticated versions of realism. As it will turn out, a realist view of science isgenerally the more sophisticated, the farther it is from naïve realism.

To see the reason for such a contrast between naïve realism and sophisticated realismconsider, for instance, Feyerabend’s questioning of the epistemological significancethat must be attached to the success of theories, briefly discussed in Section 2. Thisissue is, notoriously, a matter of eternal dispute between realists and antirealists, and

4 Among the countless book-length discussions of realism see, e.g., Psillos (1999); Niiniluoto (1999); Kuipers(2000); Chakravartty (2007); Sankey (2008). It must be mentioned that the central commitments of realists canbe formulated also in terms of (appropriately qualified versions of) the axiological thesis that science aims atdiscovering the truth about the world (see e.g. Lyons 2005 for a discussion of the axiological component ofrealism, and Rowbottom 2013 for a recent criticism of talk of the “aim of science” in general).

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therefore, one may be inclined to think that this criticism of Feyerabend’s constitutes acause for concern for any form of scientific realism, no matter how sophisticated.However, given that Feyerabend understands realism as the extremely strong view thatthe aim of science is to discover the Only True Theory, providing the correct, completedescription of reality, it seems that the actual—although certainly not the intended—target of his criticism is the kind of naïve realist which John Worrall (2011, p. 159) haslabeled the “gung ho realist,” i.e., someone who claims that we must always believe inthe truth of our currently accepted successful theories. In any case sophisticatedrealism, as we construe it here, is characterized by the explicit acknowledgment thatthe ascent from success to truth—the realist’s “Upward Path,” as Laudan (1981,pp. 32–36) famously called it—is far from guaranteed: sophisticated realists view thesuccess of theories, at most, as a fallible indicator of their (approximate) truth (see, e.g.,the works of such “critical,” or “fallibilist,” realists as Niiniluoto 1999; Psillos 1999;Kuipers 2000; and many others).

In order to introduce a second example of the features of sophisticated realism, let usbriefly recall how the creation of the “reality” investigated by the sciences is portrayedin Conquest of Abundance. According to Feyerabend, the abundance of the world isreduced by using abstractions which exclude from the domain of the legitimate objectsof inquiry the vast majority of the things that inhabit the world. A spurious distinction isthen drawn between deceiving appearances—what scientists have decided to leave outof the picture—and reality—the result of abstraction. Finally, scientists pretend that theresulting so-called “reality” is the only one that actually exists and matters. Althoughsuch a characterization may capture some important aspects of naïve realism, it doesnot apply to sophisticated versions of realism. In fact, sophisticated realists explicitlyacknowledge that highly successful theories are, strictly speaking, false, among otherthings because they involve the use of various idealizing assumptions (see, e.g., Psillos1999, pp. 265 ff.; Giere 2006, pp. 87–88, 111).5

Authors defending sophisticated versions of scientific realism—versions of suchdoctrine which are quite far from the naïve version of realism criticized byFeyerabend—embrace both the resistance thesis and, more importantly for our presentconcerns, the pliability thesis, which Feyerabend took to be incompatible with a realistoutlook. It seems to us that, in the space permitted, the best strategy to show this is tofocus on one single version of sophisticated realism, put forward by Ilkka Niiiniluoto.

Critical scientific realism, defended by Niiniluoto in such works as Is ScienceProgressive? (1984), Truthlikeness (1987), and Critical Scientific Realism (1999), is aview of science that, in the author’s words, aims to avoid “the Scylla of infallibilismand the Charybdis of skepticism” by deploying “the fallibilist conceptions of probable,conjectural, and truthlike knowledge” (1999, p. 85). Niiniluoto argues that the maincognitive aim of science is the choice of theories possessing a high degree of verisi-militude (or truthlikeness)—where a theory T is said to be highly verisimilar (ortruthlike) if it is close to the (whole) truth about a given domain. In informal terms, Tis highly verisimilar if it says many things concerning the domain (i.e., T is informative)and many of the things that T says are—almost exactly—true (i.e., T is approximatelytrue, or accurate). Since the maximally verisimilar theory is the truth itself, aiming at

5 Idealization, widely used in all fields of science, has been studied, among many others, by Krajewski (1977);Nowak (1980); McMullin (1985); Cartwright (1983, 1989).

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highly verisimilar theories also means to aim at the truth as the ideal goal of inquiry:according to Niiniluoto, the supreme rule of the axiology of science recommends to“try to find the complete true answer” to the cognitive problem that one is investigating;and “if it is known that the available answers do not include a true one, then our rule isto search for the least false among them” (ibid., p. 174).

Niiniluoto’s work falls squarely within the context of the post-Popperian theories ofverisimilitude. Developed among others by authors as Niiniluoto himself (1984) andTheo Kuipers (1987), such theories are based on explications of the notion of verisi-militude that succeed in avoiding the well-known problems encountered by KarlPopper’s (1963, 1972) original definition of the concept (Miller 1974; Tichý 1974;for an informal presentation of some such theories see Cevolani & Tambolo 2013).Backed by such explications, the claim is put forward that the progress of science canbe accounted for in terms of the increasing verisimilitude of our theories. For instance,the change from Newton’s to Einstein’s theory is viewed as progressive because,although the more recent theory is, strictly speaking, presumably false, there are goodreasons to believe that it is closer to the truth than the superseded one. The main tenets ofNiiniluoto’s fallibilist, and yet robustly realist, approach to progress can then beformulated as follows: (a) since some false theories are closer to the truth than others,a false but highly verisimilar theory can constitute a genuine approximation to the truth,and hence an instance of progress, when adopted to replace a less verisimilar theory; (b)one can devise methods to fallibly assess, on the basis of the available evidence, whichamong two competing theories is closer to the truth.

These sketchy remarks fall short of doing justice to critical scientific realism,6 butthey certainly convey the idea of a theory of science that is at cross-purposes to thatdeveloped by Feyerabend, and not only because of the massive use of formal methodsthat characterizes Niiniluoto’s work, as opposed to Feyerabend’s informal, andhistorically-oriented, way of tackling philosophical problems. As is well-known,Feyerabend never followed his former mentor Popper in considering verisimilitude asa useful tool in the analysis of science. Quite on the contrary, on various occasions heemphatically claimed that knowledge “is not a series of self-consistent theories thatconverge towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to the truth. […] It is ratheran ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives” (1993, p. 21).7 Theirdifferences notwithstanding, Feyerabend and Niiniluoto fully agree in the rejection ofthe claim that there is one ideal, privileged conceptual system to describe the world.Indeed, although the later Feyerabend did not appreciate it, sophisticated realists haveno need to assume the existence of such a privileged system; in other words, one maywell be a realist and embrace the pliability thesis.

As mentioned above, Niiniluoto views scientific inquiry as a matter of tacklingcognitive problems, that is, requests of true information concerning certain domains ofobjects or events. Arising in contexts that provide the relevant presuppositions for boththeir formulation and solution, cognitive problems range from questions that concernspecific features of the natural and social world to very abstract scientific problems. Themain goal of research is, in Niiniluoto’s account, to find the true answer to the problem

6 Pihlström et al. (2007) offers an extended discussion of Niiniluoto’s work.7 For discussions of Feyerabend’s pluralistic ideal of knowledge—which Niiniluoto (1999, p. 294) aptly defines“an extremely cumulativist account of science”—see, among others, Motterlini (2006) and Oberheim (2006).

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at hand, and “truthlikeness measures how close we come to this goal” (1999, p. 174).However, as Niiniluoto hastens to add in his presentation of critical scientific realism,“truth is not easily accessible or recognizable” (ibid., p. 10): that “certified truth iseasily accessible” (ibid., p. 13) is a view embraced only by naïve realists. What is moreimportant for our present purposes—and contrary to what Feyerabend’s critique ofrealism may lead some to believe—, the assessments of the truthlikeness of theories areexplicitly acknowledged to be relative to the conceptual system that one chooses todescribe the world.

This can be easily seen by considering that a crucial component of Niiniluoto’sversion of realism is the acceptance of Tarski’s theory of truth, which specifies themeaning of the concept of truth, but does not provide criteria for recognizing specifictruths. Without entering into the details of Niiniluoto’s defense of the Tarskian theory(see 1987, Ch. 4; 1999, Ch. 3) let us mention that, within such theory, truth is defined ascorrespondence between interpreted sentences in a language L and facts. The choice ofthe so-called “interpretation function,” which connects the sentences in L with theworld, is not determined by any “natural” fact but, rather, by human conventions.Humans are free to choose the language that they prefer to describe the world; but oncethe meaning of a sentence is determined, its factual truth is “determined by the actualworld” (1987, p. 141). In other words, the truth value of a sentence in the language Lthat we choose to describe the world

depends on the structure of the world relative to the descriptive vocabulary of L.True sentences are not in a relation of correspondence to a non-structured reality,but rather to a structure consisting of objects with some properties and relations.[…] we may say that “states of affairs” are relative to languages which are used todescribe them. But it does not follow that facts depend on our knowledge or thattruth is in any sense “epistemic:” as soon as a language L is given, with predicatesdesignating some properties, it is up to the world—not to us—to “decide” whatsentences of L are factually true” (ibid.).

The world, Niiniluoto insists, is not “completely ‘plastic’ or ‘malleable’ into anyform we like,” since it “has ‘factuality’ in the sense that it is able to resist our will”(ibid., pp. 141–142).

Small wonder that a realist embraces, as Niiniluoto does in the passages just quoted,the resistance thesis. After all, realism is the doctrine that there is a mind-independentworld out there, that our theories aim at describing, and that reality constrains ourdescriptions of it; therefore, not all the possible approaches to the description of realitywill succeed. As an anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out, Niiniluoto’s version of theresistance thesis is less permissive than Feyerabend’s. For instance, as mentionedabove, Feyerabend claims that an appropriate molding of the pliable material handledby scientists allows one to get “a nature that is alive and full of Gods” (1999a, p. 145),but it is far from obvious that Niiniluoto would be prepared to accept such a claim: hemay well remark that some conceptual systems are unsuccessful because their keyterms fail to refer. More generally, Feyerabend is a bit vague when it comes to preciselycharacterizing the resistance that, sometimes, the world opposes to the attempts todescribe it in certain ways (see Section 3), while Niiniluoto insists, as the abovediscussion illustrates, that such resistance is explained by the fact that the world has

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the ability to determine the truth values of the sentences of L.8 In any case, what isimportant to note for our present purposes, and certainly contradicts the laterFeyerabend’s portrayal of the typical realist attitude, is that Niiniluoto rejects the viewthat there is one ideal conceptual system to describe the world and embraces thepliability thesis, according to which the world lends itself to being described by morethan one conceptual system:

The correspondence theory of truth does not presuppose that the world is “ready-made,” carved into “pieces” or into individuals and essential properties indepen-dently of man. There is no privileged language to describe the world. Differentconceptual systems […] constitute the world in different ways into “objects” or“individuals,” and they always select for consideration only some of the proper-ties of these objects. In this sense, our ontology in practice is a reflection of thechoice of the language (ibid., p. 141).

Not unlike Feyerabend, Niiniluoto claims that the world “can be conceptualized inmany different ways. Each conceptual system so to say picks out its own facts fromsomething—let us call it THE WORLD—which is not yet conceptualized or carvedinto pieces” (ibid.). 9 Scientific inquiry, Niiniluoto argues, is a game in which theinquirer’s choice of a conceptual system to answer a cognitive problem is only thefirst move, which is typically followed, in later turns, both by the world’s responses—which lead to excluding certain ways to describe the world’s structure—and byconceptual enrichment, which “helps us to formulate finer cognitive problems” (ibid.,p. 143) and gain deeper knowledge of reality.

Although critical scientific realism is clearly at cross-purposes to the views advo-cated by the later Feyerabend, the pliability thesis lies at the very heart of Niiniluoto’sapproach. And Niiniluoto is certainly not the only sophisticated realist who, in theattempt to avoid both infallibilism and skepticism, denies that there is one ideal,privileged conceptual system to describe the world: to mention but two examples,Theo Kuipers’ (2000) constructive realism and Ronald Giere’s (2006) perspectivalrealism immediately spring to mind.

To our knowledge, the unexpected fact that Feyerabend’s insights concerning thelimited pliability of the world are those of a potential ally of sophisticated realism hasso far gone unnoticed in the literature devoted to his later output. Nevertheless, weshould emphasize that Feyerabend’s writings are far from being the only—or the first—place where one ought to look for inspiration concerning the possibility to combine thepliability thesis and the resistance thesis within a realist framework. Indeed, theinterplay between (versions of) such theses has arguably been a major topic, forinstance, in the debates concerning Hilary Putnam’s internal realism.10

8 Relatedly, Niiniluoto’s critical scientific realism eschews relativism because all the conceptual systems usedto describe the world are viewed as fragments of the same world, “and therefore cannot be incompatible witheach other” (1999, p. 224).9 “Depending on the choice of a suitable conceptual framework,” Niiniluoto claims elsewhere, “THEWORLD can be ‘sliced’ or ‘structured’ to a system of a momentary events, mass points, physical systems,etc.” (1999, p. 222).10 Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point. The same reviewer rightly notes thatsimilar remarks apply also, more generally, to the pragmatist tradition in philosophy of science.

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In this connection, it seems appropriate to recall, at least, that in the mid to late 1970sPutnam mounted a sustained attack against a doctrine which he called “metaphysicalrealism” (see, e.g., 1978, pp. 123–138). As he put it in Reason, Truth and History,metaphysical realism is a package of theses including the claim that “there is exactlyone true and complete description of ‘the way the world is’” (1981, p. 49)—acharacterization which strictly parallels Feyerabend’s portrayal of what here we referredto as “naïve realism,” i.e., the doctrine that the aim of science is to discover the OnlyTrue Theory, providing the correct, complete description of reality. Putnam contrastedmetaphysical realism with his “internalist perspective,” revolving around the claim that“there is more than one ‘true’ description of the world” (ibid.). Famously, internalrealism rejects the idea that scientists can approach the world from an external—orGod’s Eye, as Putnam called it—point of view. According to Putnam, although theworld exists independently of the human mind, it does not have a built-in structure: thestructure of the world, as described by scientific theories, is the result of humanconceptual activities, and reflects the “various interests and purposes” (ibid., p. 50)which such activities are aimed at serving. Therefore, Putnam argued, the truth ofscientific theories should be thought of not as a correspondence relation between wordsand mind-independent states of affairs but, rather, as “some sort of (idealized) rationalacceptability” (ibid.): our beliefs need to cohere both with each other and with ourexperiences, as the latter get represented within our belief system. In other words,internal realism—which Putnam later came to consider as an “unhappy label” for hisposition (see, e.g., 1994, p. 463, fn. 41)—is basically an attempt to articulate the insightthat although the world, as described by scientific theories, is in some sense the productof human activities, this does not necessarily lead to relativist or idealist outcomes.

In light of the preceding remarks, we submit that the interplay between the pliabilitythesis and the resistance thesis, as it unfolds in the later Feyerabend’s writings, has to beviewed as yet another illustration of the fact that the possibility of a plurality ofconceptualizations of the world does not, in itself, constitute an argument againstsuitably sophisticated forms of realism.

5 Concluding remarks

In this paper, after introducing the later Feyerabend’s critique of realism (which is, infact, the critique of a naïve version of realism), we discussed the main features of hisalternative view of scientific inquiry, revolving around the pliability thesis and theresistance thesis. We showed that the pliability thesis lies at the heart of sophisticatedversions of scientific realism, and we suggested that Feyerabend’s insights concerningthe limited pliability of the world are those of a potential ally of sophisticated realism.

Let us emphasize that our main aim here has not been so much that of pointing outthe weaknesses of Feyerabend’s treatment of realism. Rather, what the foregoingillustrates is, to our mind, the strength of the realist approach to science, oftentimesunderestimated by its critics. Feyerabend, for one, views realism as going hand in handwith an extremely strong form of theoretical monism, i.e., with the claim that scienceaims at discovering the Only True Theory, providing the correct, complete descriptionof reality. But as our discussion suggests, realism is the more defensible and attractive,the more nuanced and guarded—the more sophisticated—it gets. When considering the

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issue of the conceptual systems that one may use to describe the world, a sophisticatedrealist will deny that there is one ideal, privileged such system: as Ronald Giere vividlyput it, a sophisticated realist is not committed to the view that science is “in the businessof discovering the language God used when he named the beasts of the field in theGarden of Eden” (2006, p. 85).

We must note that, of course, the embrace of the pliability thesis and of the resistancethesis does not suffice to make a view of science a sophisticated realist one—indeed,Feyerabend put them into the service of what he hoped would be an alternative to bothrelativism and realism, and he never considered the possibility to join the realist camp.It seems to us that this was basically due to the need, that he urgently felt, to safeguardpluralism. Feyerabend was suspicious of any talk of “reality,” since he thought thatsuch notion can be invoked in order to silence dissenting voices and put a ban on theproliferation of alternatives to the prevailing view. According to him, any embrace ofrealism, no matter how sophisticated, would have amounted to a betrayal of thepluralist ideal of knowledge as “an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatiblealternatives” (1993, p. 14) that he defended throughout all of his career. And yet,against Feyerabend’s intentions, in his later writings insights are on offer which shouldcommand the appreciation of sophisticated realists.

Acknowledgments This paper started life as a contributed talk delivered at the international conference“Feyerabend 2012,” wonderfully organized by Eric Oberheim and Matteo Collodel at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. I am grateful to the audience, and especially Karim Bschir, Ronald Giere, and HowardSankey, for questions and suggestions, and to Ian James Kidd for his extensive written remarks on the text ofmy presentation. Thanks are due to Gustavo Cevolani, Roberto Festa, John Preston, and two anonymousreviewers for their comments on previous versions of the paper. Usual disclaimers apply. Financial supportfrom PRIN grant “Probability, Confirmation and Verisimilitude” is gratefully acknowledged.

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