Science, Politics, and Swift Boats • P. T. Jackson • Page 19
As such, knowledge practices are of necessity channeled into the promotion of
correspondence between the world of things and the thoughts about those things that
researchers maintain. True statements about the world are those that accurately reflect
the world, although they need not do so in their internal grammatical structure or in
their precise conceptual bases; it is sufficient that a true statement express some fact that
is verifiably the case. Although Searle suggests that it is possible to be a realist without
accepting the correspondence theory of truth, the way in which this would be possible
remains somewhat obscure. If the (externally existing) real world is important to
knowledge practices, it must be important to those practices by providing a limit
against which they might flounder if wrong. So the fact that external reality matters in
realist accounts opens the possibility of falsifying conjectures that do not correspond to
that external reality, and hence leaving only those conjectures that presumably
correspond better. Indeed, the most sophisticated defense of realism to date (Aronson et
al. 1995) argues that the correspondence theory of truth is more important to realism
than the presumption of a mind-independent world.
10
It is difficult to imagine a
consistent realism that did not limit knowledge practices in this manner.
10
Giving up a mind-independent reality while remaining a realist involves both re-evaluating truth as a limiting case of
verisimilitude and accepting the notion that science is performed on instrument-world complexes rather than on “the
world” in itself. The particular affordances of the world revealed by a particular set of instruments and “conceptual
resources” are, if not mind-independent, at least non-arbitrary (Aronson, et al. 1995: 140-141), and theories are
ultimately reducible to arrangements of natural kinds “that must exist independently of any human project or conceptual
system” (ibid.: 43-44). Hence there is an “intransigent order of nature” (ibid.), but that order is only ever accessible
through knowledge practices which affect how and in what form it will manifest itself; different practices will reveal
different orders, and progress will occur through convergence rather than through hypothesis-testing (ibid.: 194-196).
Convention