Realism and Observation: The View from Generative Grammar

Gabe Dupre

doi:10.1017/psa.2022.2

Abstract

AbstractStandard proposals of scientific anti-realism assume that the methodology of a scientific research program can be endorsed without accepting its metaphysical commitments. I argue that the distinction between competence, the rules governing one’s language faculty, and performance, or linguistic behavior, precludes this. Linguistic theories aim to describe competence, not performance, and so must be able to distinguish observations reflective of the former from those reflective of the latter. This classification of data makes sense only against the background of a psychologically realistic view of linguistic theory. So the very methodology of the science commits one to its realistic interpretation.

Highlights

Once perhaps the central topic in ‘general’ philosophy of science, the realism/antirealism debate has fallen out of favour in the last few decades
I attempt to connect these traditional concerns with this recent ‘particularist’ stance, providing an argument for scientific realism based on the methodology of a particular science: generative linguistics
I have presented a novel argument for scientific realism

Summary

Introduction

Once perhaps the central topic in ‘general’ philosophy of science, the realism/antirealism debate has fallen out of favour in the last few decades. This package view is most famously defended by Van Fraassen 1980 This desire to avoid downplaying the successes of science, in addition to providing a central motivation for instrumentalism, seems to commit the anti-realist, at least tacitly, to the assumption of what I will call ‘detachability’: Detachability: One can endorse the practices and methods of a given science, without accepting the metaphysical commitments of the scientific theory appealed to. When an observation is excluded from (dis-)confirming a theory on the grounds that it is a ‘mere performance datum’, it is being claimed to be strictly irrelevant to the truth of the theory/generalization It does not counter-exemplify the rule, even as a case where not all things are equal. The anti-realist cannot appeal to the unobservable causes of our observations

Conclusion