Healey, Richard (2025) A Neopragmatist Intervention in Science. Pragmatism and Philosophy of Science. ISSN ISBN 9781032515533
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Abstract
Pragmatism is not a doctrine but an approach to conceptual problems. It regards concepts as intellectual tools we create and use for particular purposes, improving them in the light of experience. Neopragmatism is an approach to conceptual problems wherever these arise as humans manifest their naturally explicable capacity to deploy concepts, in thought as well as in language, and in science as well as in philosophy. It rejects any attempt to solve these problems by appeal to something in unconceptualised reality for a concept to represent or a linguistic item to refer to or be made true by. Focussing on concepts’ symbolic expression, the neopragmatist asks what function is served by talk of various kinds―of morals, mathematics, causes, modality, probabilities, truth, reference and representation. Starting with what we have learnt from science about our situation in the world, a neopragmatist asks how talking that way helps us to solve general problems we face as situated agents. She sees good answers as dissolving conceptual problems that stem from the assumption that the function of this talk is simply to represent reality. There are many ways in which neopragmatism helps one to dissolve problems we face in understanding quantum theory. It shows how we apply models of a theory non-representationally. It reveals the significance of talk of probability and laws of nature without indulging in metaphysics. It explains the non-representational roles of quantum states, and how inference, not reference, makes claims about the results of measurements meaningful. It makes sense of relative truth as an extension of a deflationary approach to truth and uses this to dissolve some novel quantum paradoxes. Finally, it show that quantum theory is objective although it offers no “view from nowhere”.
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