Abstract
In this talk, I attend to three main tasks. First, I locate the main rationale for my perspectival realism in what I call historical naturalism (drawing on Massimi 2022, Ch 8). I argue that our realist commitments originate from a thoroughgoing naturalistic stance. However, by contrast with classical ways in which naturalism has been portrayed in the literature (starting from Quine 1968), I point out the need to enlarge naturalism to encompass our scientific history as a way of better understanding how we came to carve the world with the kinds we know and love. Our natural kinds, I argue, are the product of our scientific history that is redefining the very idea of what ‘naturalness’ means. My second task is to give one major highlight of perspectival realism: how to rethink the ontology of natural kinds in light of historical naturalism. Here I shall bring my Neurathian approach to natural kinds in dialogue with the approaches of my co-symposiasts by highlighting relevant affinities with Chang’s view of natural kinds born out of epistemic iterations, Chirimuuta’s haptic realism with the notion of ‘ideal patterns’ and Vickers’ future-proof facts and associated commitment to predicting novel phenomena. I defend an ontology of phenomena and explain how I see natural kinds as groupings of phenomena. This way of rethinking natural kinds has the advantage of avoiding the classic problems about reference discontinuity / conceptual change at one hand, and ‘eternal natural kinds’ at the other hand. My third and last task is to articulate the reasons why I see such a shift in realist commitments as crucial for delivering a pluralist and inclusive view of scientific knowledge production, where past theories and past achievements are not just either celebrated in the hagiography of the winners or throw in the dustbin of history. Instead, they are an intrinsic part of how we reliably came to know the world as being this way. A focus on historically and culturally situated scientific perspectives, combined with an inclusive notion of ‘epistemic communities’, allows one to reassess scientific knowledge production not as the repository of an elite community of scientists. Perspectival realism celebrates the social and collaborative nature of scientific knowledge and embeds a plurality of situated epistemic communities in the very fabric of scientific knowledge production.
