Parting The Veil Of Scientific Realism

[DocWatts]

Greetings and happy holidays! Thought that I might share a write-up for my philosophy book, the explores the metaphysical assumptions behind Scientific Realism.

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Parting The Veil Of Scientific Realism

In the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hangs a deliciously subversive 1929 painting called ‘The Treachery Of Images’ by René Magritte. At a glance, the piece is unassuming enough - just an ordinary tobacco pipe set against an empty beige background - hardly the type of composition to turn heads when set against the museum’s masterworks. So why did this piece cause a fuss among art critics when it first appeared? And how does it continue to rub people the wrong way a century later? 

Well, there's one other detail about this painting we've yet to mention. Just below the pipe is a meticulously lettered declaration, written in French: 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' - 'This is not a pipe.’ Thus does the aforementioned ‘treachery’ fall into place. Little wonder that critics bristled at the provocation, which had all the subtlety of a slap to the face. No one likes admitting they’ve been deceived, especially by something that feels like a joke at our expense. Nor do we appreciate being disabused of our comfortable illusions - all the more when the rug puller seems to take pleasure in the act. 

While ‘Treachery’ is more brazen about it than most, such fourth-wall breaks have a long history. Like Cerventes stepping into the tale of Don Quixote to remind us that we’re not living out grand adventures but reading a book, the medium is the message here. In an age where metatextual commentary is a well-worn trope of popular media - from stand-up comedy to comic book films to memes - we might be tempted to write off this century-old painting as the equivalent of an internet shitpost and leave it at that. 

Yet beneath its banal presentation, 'The Treachery Of Images' is deceptively simple - a philosophical sleight of hand that cuts to an epistemic truth that’s as fundamental as it’s easy to miss. Much like the parable of the fish who’s oblivious to the water he swims in, we’re habitually oblivious to the constructed nature of our abstractions. Over time, we forget that they’re abstractions at all, and our scientific models are no exception to this. And here we arrive at the heart of the matter, which brings us full circle to our orienting metaphor: the model is not the manifestation. Like a plastic airplane on our desk, models serve us best when we remember that they’re impressions of Reality, created for a specific purpose - not Reality itself.

Would you try to eat a picture of an apple? Drive a blueprint? Travel to a simulated city? This isn’t mere wordplay - it cuts to the category error inherent to Scientific Realism. A category error is a logical fallacy that occurs when we mistake one kind of thing (a model or representation) for something altogether different in kind (the reality it represents). When Margitte states that ‘this is not a pipe’, it’s exactly this distinction that he’s highlighting.

The fallacy of Scientific Realism isn’t intrinsic to scientific inquiry itself - it stems from how we overextend its successes. Our habitual grasping for an absolute ground upon which our knowledge can safely rest can lead us to extend these models into ontological domains that lie beyond their explanatory reach. Science constructs predictive models of natural phenomena, but it’s not a shortcut for the embodied familiarity with the world that makes those models meaningful. It excels at precise mechanistic investigation, but raw data isn’t a replacement for the interpretive lens through which we transform information into understanding. It can tell us how things behave, but it’s not the arbiter of what things ultimately are - since ‘things’ are constructed distinctions, not fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. 

The takeaway? In spite of its considerable explanatory power, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Its usefulness comes from its integration with the Life-World - that shared, experiential world which serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. It’s this Life-World, in all of its visceral immediacy - with its pleasures and sorrows, its mysteries and mundanity, its straightforwardness and complexity - that science is downstream from. 

By this point, an astute reader may have picked up on a seeming contradiction, stemming from our account that knowledge lacks an absolute ground. By emphasizing the primacy of this Life-World, aren't we falling into the same performative contradiction that we criticized earlier, substituting one absolute ground for another? The distinction here is subtle but decisive. 

The difference lies in how the Life-World isn't some hidden metaphysical domain behind appearances - this isn't Plato's Realm of Forms repackaged or 'The Matrix' with a fresh coat of paint. Rather, the Life-World and the material reality that science investigates are mutually constitutive - like how hot and cold aren’t isolated properties, but give meaning to one another. The Life-World is the canvas for our lived experience, yet this canvas itself is shaped by the material reality it presents. There is no absolute ground here - trying to find one would be like searching for the ‘true’ pole of temperature in either hot or cold. 

So why even bring it up then if the Life-World isn’t some privileged vantage point for what’s ultimately ‘real’? Because when we neglect our access point to Reality, we stumble into the fallacy of treating our constructed distinctions as ‘more real’ than the embodied experience they’re meant to illuminate. Thus does the veil of Scientific Realism blind us to the lived context that gives our models meaning.

A vivid case study for how these two poles - the Life-World and material reality - arise together and give meaning to one another can be found in how color is disclosed to us. Here we find a powerful demonstration of the folly inherent to Scientific Realism, in treating physical properties as the ‘true reality’ behind appearances. When we treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ or ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ as absolutes rather than constructed abstractions, we tend to miss how our everyday world is seamlessly given before our distinctions divide it.

The sweeping tango between these two poles is central for how our minds construct color - yes, color is constructed, it’s not an inherent property of objects. At a glance this might seem counterintuitive, but recall our earlier point that ‘constructed’ does not mean imaginary! Just as a concert emerges from the resonance of performer, venue, and audience, color emerges from the interplay of mind, body, and environment. Color isn’t ‘out there’ in some mind-independent Reality, but neither is it an independent fabrication of the mind. Is color a property? Yes, but not in the way that mass and charge are properties of atoms. So if color isn’t a physical property and it’s not purely mental, then what is this taken-for-granted chimera? It’s an interactional property that we enact through our embeddedness in the world.

This brings us back to our earlier discussion of relevance realization - how living minds filter and prioritize information from their environment, based on what matters for their survival and flourishing. Crucially, the bulk of relevance realization isn’t a conscious ‘choice’. When we make a conscious decision to prioritize one thing over another, this is but the tip of a much larger iceberg that’s largely hidden from view. Instead, the bulk of relevance realization is largely pre-reflective and automatic - a consequence of how the world is disclosed to us due to our physiology and past experiences, long before conceptual awareness enters into the picture. When it comes to our perception of color, we can see how this process shapes our construction of categories in a fundamental way.

We don’t perceive the electromagnetic spectrum in its raw form - this would  be overwhelming and largely useless to us. Color perception interacts with only a small portion, which science has termed ‘visible light’. And even within this minute slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, color vision isn’t a replication of this territory. It’s more akin to a highly involved form of curation, that’s tightly coupled to our needs and capacities. Our perceptual system doesn’t retrieve pre-existing boundaries in nature - it actively creates those boundaries through the dynamic coupling of mind, body, and world.

To understand this interplay between mind, body, and world, let's look at what science tells us about color - and where it leaves holes that can’t be fully probed by its methodological tools alone. Consider the color ‘red’ - science can precisely model the wavelengths of light that evoke this perceptual experience. Through mechanistic investigation, it can describe how light enters our eye through our cornea, is focused by our lens, and reaches specialized photoreceptors in our retina. From here, it can tell us how these cone cells convert light into electrical signals that travel via the optic nerve to our brain, and map out the neural pathways that process this information. 

While these investigative insights are hard-won and essential for an understanding of color, an ‘outside-in’ vantage point can only get us so far. No amount of scientific data can fully capture what it’s like to see a ripe strawberry that’s very, very red. If we’re describing this experience to someone without vision, we can explain its mechanics, we can try analogizing it to other senses - but something essential about seeing red remains stubbornly ineffable. Just as something is lost when we transcribe a song to lyrics on a page, or when we have to explain the punchline of a joke, color must be experienced to be understood.

In sum, while lived experience is irreducible to mechanistic explanation, science has an prominent role to play in how we reflect upon this experience. Science and the Life-World aren’t opposed to one another - they’re two sides of the same coin, standing in a relationship of mutual illumination. Just as it’s nonsensical to ask whether our coin is ‘really’ heads or tails, neither science nor the Life-World should be treated as an absolute ground. Which of these two sides we choose to prioritize in our attempts to make sense of the world has everything to do with what we’re trying to understand. 

Moreover, both halves of the coin have much to gain by being in dialogue with one another. Scientific inquiry benefits from the knowledge that its theoretical constructs aren’t an approximation of a ‘view from nowhere’, but are a reflection of our embodied experience within the Life-World. On the flip side, our navigation of the Life-World is enriched by how science grounds our assumptions in verifiable realities and extends our understanding beyond the immediacy of our direct experience.

This brings us to a deeper truth about the nature of understanding itself. Every perspective, whether scientific or experiential, both reveals certain aspects of Reality while necessarily obscuring others. Consider the parable of blindfolded people touching different parts of an elephant - its trunk, its tusk, its ear, and its tail - and coming to widely different conclusions about what they’re examining. Like these blindfolded observers, each of our vantage points comes with its own insights and limitations. As we’ll discover in the next chapter, this isn’t a ‘flaw’ of human reasoning that can be neatly excised by adopting progressively larger viewpoints. So-called ‘theories of everything’, while useful for getting a rough lay of the land, aren’t a shortcut around this limitation. As we zoom out to a larger field-of-view, we take in more of the territory but also lose essential detail. And as we’ve just seen, recourse to an absolute ground is another dead-end - for there’s no final arbiter for what’s ultimately ‘real’ that can transcend our human perspective within Reality.

The path forward isn’t to chase an impossible ‘view from nowhere’, but to understand how these different vantage points can complement and enrich one another. Just as the blindfolded observers would gain a fuller picture by sharing their experiences rather than arguing about whose view is ‘really real’, we make progress by bringing our diverse perspectives into good-faith dialogue. Yet this openness to multiple viewpoints must also come with the recognition that not every perspective deserves a seat at the table.  Some perspectives are grounded in bad faith, intellectual dishonesty, or the willful denial of verifiable realities. We need not lose sleep over excluding Nazis from weighing in on public discussions about the Holocaust, nor do fossil fuel companies need to be given additional opportunities to spread climate change denial. Learning how to parse this difference between legitimate disagreement and willful distortion will be crucial as we navigate the challenges ahead.

Moving forward, we’ll examine how the inherent partiality of perspectives isn’t a bug but an essential feature of our sensemaking frameworks. Coming to grips with this partiality will help us thread a more constructive course between rigid absolutism and inconsistent relativism. Rather than seeing this partiality as a problem to be solved, we’ll discover how to leverage it to develop more nuanced and adaptable ways of understanding.

[Leo Gura]

Well written.

I would like to see more meat on the bone. What are the assumptions of scientific realism and where are they wrong?

If you're gonna deconstruct science you gotta strike it right in the heart, or it will not land. If you're sorta vague about it, people will easily dismiss it.

But maybe this was just an intro.

Edited Monday at 11:20 PM by Leo Gura

[DocWatts]

46 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Well written.

I would like to see more meat on the bone. What are the assumptions of scientific realism and where are they wrong?

If you're gonna deconstruct science you gotta strike it right in the heart, or it will not land. If you're sorta vague about it, people will easily dismiss it.

But maybe this was just an intro.

Thanks! This is actually a subsection from a book chapter that explores the epistemology of science (and conceptual knowledge more broadly) - how science helps us discern relevance patterns beyond everyday observational reasoning, the role and purpose of conceptual models, the constructed nature of subject-object dualism, our evolving archetypes of 'realness' and our emotional attachment to an absolute ground for knowledge, and the performative contradiction Scientific Realism.

I've been posting little snippets here and there. This is part of a chapter called 'Categories Are Always Contextual.'

Been an interesting challenge to try to present somewhat self-contained snippets from a more cohesive work that builds to advanced epistemological insights - I imagine you've run into some of that as well with your content.

Edited Monday at 11:59 PM by DocWatts