Abstract
Modeling his position on Arthur Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude, Derek Turner proposed the Natural Historical Attitude. Although these positions share a family resemblance, Turner’s position differs from Fine’s in two important ways. First, Fine’s contextualism is more fine-grained. Second, Turner’s argument for metaphysical agnosticism seems to lead to the implausible conclusion that we should be agnostic about the mind-independence of ordinary objects – a position in tension with Fine’s “core position.” While this paper presents a textual analysis of Fine’s and Turner’s arguments, the conclusions reached here cohere well with some of the best empirically-informed assessments of the historical sciences. Given the diversity of the historical sciences, the fact that many claims in the historical sciences have enough support to be regarded as true, and the implausibility of Turner’s agnosticism, philosophers studying historical science would be better served by embracing a stance closer to Fine’s Natural Ontological Attitude.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
As one referee noted, this statement of the core position is vague. Exactly what does it mean to “accept that quarks are real”? This aspect of Fine’s position is – by design -- difficult to pin down. Fine (1991) argues that trying to provide a more detailed explication of the proper form of acceptance or belief is not a productive task. Further, he wants the core position to be compatible with varying degrees of confidence and skepticism about the reality of postulated entities. These aspects of the core position are discussed more fully in Sects. 4.1 and 5.3.
See Sect. 5 for a more detailed discussion of this point. Although Fine is an epistemic realist in one sense (i.e., he accepts the truth of many well-justified scientific claims), he rejects any version of scientific realism that is committed to the correspondence theory of truth.
There are many different versions of constructivism (Mallon, 2019). For the sake of simplicity in this paper, I will address only those forms of constructivism that Turner highlights.
Turner labels these statements H and H* but uses the same labels (with different assigned meanings) on p. 147. In order to avoid confusion, I consistently use HR and HC as defined here. Within direct quotations, I place my labels in square brackets.
In commenting on a draft of this paper, Turner noted that the issue of mind-independence is rarely if ever raised in scientific debates. I agree. Since the issue is not central to scientific discourse or practice, philosophers of science should not press the issue – unless there are good (local) reasons to do so.
In this passage, Turner focuses on the “distant past” even though his general focus is on “pre-history” (i.e.,more than 5,000 years ago).
This argument against the correspondence theory has been challenged by realists such as Musgrave (1989) and Kitcher (2001). The dispute over the adequacy of the correspondence theory is too large to address in this essay. This is one respect in which I do not offer a full defense of NOA. Rather, my claim is this: given that Fine and Turner both prefer the deflationary approach, if my critique of metaphysical agnosticism is correct, then Turner should move to embrace a position closer to NOA.
References
Armour-Garb, B., Stoljar, D., & Woodbridge, J. (2022). Deflationism about truth. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/truth-deflationary/.
Bertenthal, B. I., Longo, M. R., & Kenny, S. (2007). Phenomenal permanence and the development of predictive tracking in infancy. Child Development, 78(1), 350–363.
Carman, C. (2005). The electrons of the dinosaurs and the center of the earth. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 36, 171–174.
Cleland, C. (2002). Methodological and epistemic differences between historical science and and experimental science. Philosophy of Science, 69, 474–496.
Cleland, C. (2011). Prediction and explanation in historical natural science. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 62, 551–582.
Crasnow, S. (2000). How natural can ontology be? Philosophy of Science, 67, 114–132.
Currie, A. (2018). Rock, bone, and ruin. MIT Press.
Darden, L. (2005). Relations among fields: Mendelian, cytological and molecular mechanisms. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36, 349–371.
DeRose, K. (1992). Contextualism and knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LII(4), 913–929.
Fine, A. (1984a). The natural ontological attitude. In J. Leplin (Ed.) Scientific realism. University of California Press. Reprinted in A. Fine (1986) The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (pp. 112–135). University of Chicago Press.
Fine, A. (1984b). And not anti-realism either. Nous, 18, 51–65. Reprinted in A. Fine (1986) The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (pp. 136 – 150). University of Chicago Press.
Fine, A. (1986). Unnatural attitudes. Mind, 95, 149–179.
Fine, A. (1991). Piecemeal realism. Philosophical Studies, 61(1/ 2), 79–96.
Fine, A. (1996). Science made up: Constructivist sociology of scientific knowledge. In P. Galison, & D. Stump (Eds.), The disunity of science: Boundaries, contexts, and power (pp. 231–254). Stanford University Press.
Hull, D. L. (1978). A matter of individuality. Philosophy of Science, 45, 335–360.
Jeffares, B. (2010). Guessing the future of the past. Biology and Philosophy, 25, 125–142.
Kitcher, P. (2001). Science, truth, and democracy. Oxford UP.
Kosso, P. (2001). Knowing the past: Philosophical issues of history and archaeology. Humanities Books.
Mallon, R. (2019). Naturalistic approaches to social construction. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/social-construction-naturalistic/.
McArthur, D. (2006). The anti-philosophical stance, the realism question and scientific practice. Foundations of Science, 11(4), 369–397.
Miller, R. (1987). Fact and method. Princeton UP.
Musgrave, A. (1989). NOA’s ark – fine for realism. Philosophical Quarterly, 39, 383–398.
Rouse, J. (1988). Arguing for the natural ontological attitude. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1, 294–301.
Tucker, A. (2011). Historical science, over- and underdetermined: A study of Darwin’s inference of origins. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 62(4), 805–829.
Turner, D. (2007). Making prehistory: Historical science and the scientific realism debate. Cambridge UP.
Turner, D. (2016). A second look at the colors of dinosaurs. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 55, 60–68.
Vogel, J. (2005). The refutation of skepticism. In M. Steup, & E. Sosa (Eds.), Contemporary debates in Epistemology (pp. 72–84). Blackwell.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Arthur Fine for his support of this project. Thanks also to Derek Turner and the anonymous referees; their comments and suggestions led to significant improvements in the essay.
Funding
No funds, grants, or other support was received.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Grantham, T. Toward a more natural historical attitude. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 14, 2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-023-00564-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-023-00564-3