Abstract
According to Ian Hacking’s Entity Realism, unobservable entities that scientists carefully manipulate to study other phenomena are real. Although Hacking presents his case in an intuitive, attractive, and persuasive way, his argument remains elusive. I present five possible readings of Hacking’s argument: a no-miracle argument, an indispensability argument, a transcendental argument, a Vichian argument, and a non-argument. I elucidate Hacking’s argument according to each reading, and review their strengths, their weaknesses, and their compatibility with each other.
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Notes
My subsequent mentions of truth should be understood as referring to approximate truth as well.
I thank Anjan Chakravartty and an anonymous reviewer for this clarification.
This is not to deny that an IBE may have a double warrant. I discuss this option in Sect. 5.
According to my taxonomy of argument types, Morrison’s interpretation can also be read as an indispensability interpretation.
In fact, it is hard to interpret Maddy’s (2007, p. 406) own explication and analysis of Perrin’s argument for the existence of atoms other than as an IBE. Even according to Maddy’s own account, Perrin inferred the existence of unobservable atoms from the fact that they produced an observable pattern that was identical to the pattern of Brownian motion of observable entities, where the production of such Brownian motion by atoms had been a novel prediction of statistical thermodynamics.
I thank Yemima Ben-Menahem for drawing my attention to the resemblance between Hacking and Vico.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Anjan Chakravartty, Jacob Stegenga, Yemima Ben-Menahem, and Daniel Steel for helpful comments and discussions. This paper was presented at the Israel Society for History and Philosophy of Science Annual Meeting, Jerusalem, 2013, and at the PSA Biennial Meeting, Chicago, 2014. I thank the audience members for helpful comments. I am grateful to the students at my seminar in philosophy of science at the Bar Ilan University Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Society for realizing that getting at the bottom of Hacking’s argument is tricky. I thank the Dan David Foundation, the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, and the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for postdoctoral fellowships.
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Miller, B. What is Hacking’s argument for entity realism?. Synthese 193, 991–1006 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0789-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0789-y