Michela Massimi, "Perspectival Realism" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Welcome to the new Books Network. Hello and welcome to No Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the No Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Tilly, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Michaela Masimi, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her new book, "Perspect to Hyrule Realism," is just out from Oxford University Press. For many philosophers, the fact that scientists take different perspectives on the world is an obstacle to being a realist about the world. In "Perspect to Hyrule Realism," Masimi argues that to the contrary, the plurality of perspectives is the driving force behind realism. On Her view, the scientific realism that emerges out of the "Perspect title" nature of scientific representation takes perspectival models as inferential blueprints for exploring what is possible. The realist's primitives are not essential properties, but the stable, low-like dependencies that are identified again and again from different perspectives. Masimi also shows how scientific communities develop what she calls natural kinds with a human face, which are evolving groupings of modally robust phenomena that result from the historically and culturally situated systems of scientific practices. Masimi's book constructs a new vision of what realism can be that will be highly influential for years to come. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Mekela Masimi. Welcome to new books in philosophy. Hello, Kari. Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. This is one of the most interesting books, defenses and explanations and elaborations of realism that I've come across in recent years, which comes from as the title says, integrating the whole idea of different perspectives in science. So I'm quite sure it's going to be very influential in years coming forward. So before we get into the nitty-gritty of the book itself, maybe you can say a bit about yourself as a philosopher, you came to philosophy and then the genesis of this book. Thank you very much, Kari, for the really kind introduction. I discovered philosophy when I was in secondary school. I was lucky enough to grow up in a country like Italy, where philosophy is taught in secondary school, state schools. And I was mesmerized by the subject at a very young age. But I always been also interested in science. So remember as a teenager I would read popular science books about physics, for example. So when I had to choose at the age of 18 what I wanted to study at university, it was a really tough choice because there was a part on me that was really interested in science. But I think my love for philosophy prevailed in the end. So that's how I ended up studying philosophy at university. The story behind this particular book has been kind of long. It's been a long book in the making and really started maybe 17 years ago, something. I've always been interested in debates about realism and anti-realism in science. Really since I was a postgraduate student. And in a way my interest in realism has always got entangled with my interest in Kant, philosophy of nature and Kantianism and philosophy of science in general. And so it was really when Ron Giri's book came out in 2006 called "Santifi Perspectivism" that in a way or so in the position that Giri was developing in the book, a possible way of answering some of the general questions ahead of our realism. And in a way developing the project that Ron Giri started in that book. I mean, "Santifi Perspectivism" Ron Giri's book was not intended to be a book about realism, or is really a book about the role the perspectives play in experimentation and theorizing. But towards the end of the book, it discusses how this might have an impact on our way of thinking about realism and this is where the book ends. So in a way I wanted to continue the project that Ron Giri had started and that's how basically this book took a life of its own. And really going back to my Kantian interest, there's a broadly Kantian question behind the book, which is how is knowledge of nature possible. And there really shapes the two main question behind the book. So how do we form a reliable knowledge of nature from a point of view that is always situated and perspective, and that's a question in part one of the book. And the second question is how does the world look like as a result of this process, which is the second part of the book. Right. So, right, it's very, very, very well logically kind of oriented into those two parts, the perspective, a part, and then the realism part. And so you give this perspective, story of how, as you put it, we justifiably infer or form our realist commitments. So maybe we could start with part one, the perspective a little bit. So one of the important moves, I think you make it in the very beginning, is to distinguish two basic senses of perspective. Could you say a bit about those two different senses and the one that matters for scientific realism? Sure. So obviously the very word, the perspective, and it immediately brings to mind the metaphors from the history of art and the role of perspective and perspective drawing and the impact that the use of perspective ahead on not only the history of art, but also the history of cartography, the history of architecture, the history of urban planning. So one thing I would say straight at the outset is that, and I really want to dispel the possible misunderstanding that the use of perspective may have in this context. If not meant to suggest in any way the idea of the agent as a spectator of nature, the idea of a perspective has been absolutely pivotal in shaping the way we think about, as I said, cartography, architecture, urban planning. We use perspective and perspective drawing, because otherwise we won't be able to build buildings, bridges, and design entire areas of our urban planning and so forth. So the metaphor of the perspective is key for the things that we do and we build and we construct, not just for the kind of classical metaphor of the agent as a spectator. And this is something that I developed throughout the book, especially kind of a way through in chapter five where I discuss the analogy with architecture of blueprint. But going back to the very basic idea of a perspective drawing, if you think of a perspective drawing, really any example that comes to mind in the book I discuss the Anolfini portrait by Jan Van Eyck as one example of perspective drawing and a compare with Las Meninas from Badiego Velázquez. What is interesting is that the first thing that comes to mind about a perspective representation is that it is a representation from a specific vantage point. So the perspective of the representation is usually understood as the expression of the situated vantage point from which the scene is represented or is painted. But there is another sense of perspective that is equally very important. A representation is perspective title because it has one or more vantage points towards which the lines are drawn and it is the use of those vanishing points that allows the representation to appear as if it was from a specific vantage point. So obviously those two notions of perspective, what I call perspective one, from a specific vantage point and perspective two, namely directed towards one or more vanishing points are really two sides of the same coin. So a representation is perspective one only because it is perspective two. It is only in virtue of their being a vanishing point. points towards which the lines are drawn that we can have a representation that looks like it has been drawn from a specific vantage point. But in philosophical discourse, we tend to blur the distinction between these two senses of being perspectival. So very often what you find is that people talk about the perspectival nature of the representation or the perspectival nature of knowledge without really having in mind the second notion of perspectivity, which is really the one that matters for my realist project, namely that we encounter reality, we open windows on reality via this process of projecting towards a vanishing point. So the whole project of the book is really an attempt to describe how is it possible for human beings like us wonderfully diverse, a trip lurality of historical and cultural situative perspectives to encounter reality and open up windows on reality in this way. So I'm using the metaphor from the art historian Erwin Panowski, there's a beautiful essay that describes the history of perspective in art, where he says the importance of perspective and the use of machines like perspectives in the Renaissance allowed to transform to the mention of canvas and contingent aggregates of objects into something that looks like a window reality. So I use this metaphor opening up windows of reality as a way of saying that through our scientific practices and modeling techniques, we're able to always from a situative vantage point opening up windows of reality and that's the only way through which we encounter the world as being populated with the phenomena that we do believe are real. So that's the part of the book at the beginning where I set out this two notion of perspective, one, perspective, two. And I, really in the bulk of the book, I explore the second notion. So this idea of directionality of the representation, the opening up window reality. But I go back to the first notion, which is a sort of more common and the one that immediately comes from the mind at the end in the final chapter 11. But I go back to the idea of the situatedness of knowledge and explore more different ways of thinking about what makes scientific knowledge situated. Right. Good. Good. Yeah, because one of the, you know, outside of this context, you know, and typically not in discussions, you know, in more, well, and in other fields, the whole idea of perspective is wound up with the idea of being subjective as opposed to objective. And, and so the, there's a, there's a very quick, you know, fallacious argument, but it's, it's very, very popular. So, you know, because we have these perspectives, you know, subjective perspectives, therefore, you know, any sort of theory or any sort of, you know, outcome we have is itself going to be subjective. You don't really get into that, that issue, that issue much, right. But it would be held at some point, you know, if you say, you know, how the vantage point sort of, you know, metaphor, corresponds or how that's related to this subjectivity aspect of perspective. Yeah, so that's a very good point, right, because as soon as one talks about perspective, the first thing that comes to mind is the perspective understood as a subject on a system of belief or point of view, kind of colloquially speaking, but that's not the way I use the term perspective and scientific perspective as a start with. So that's an important distinction. So there's a big literature about points of view and exactly point the point of view of the observer and support, but when it comes to science and scientific perspectives, which is the tradition that I've been following and what we really mean by perspective is the, what I mean by perspective, my own definition building up from give us on view, which was rooted in the semantic view of theories. So for him, a perspective was a family of models. So I talked about the Newtonian perspective or the Maxwellian perspective on so forth. The way I speak about scientific perspective is as a historical and culturalistic way to practice of a particular community at a particular time. And by that, what I mean is essentially three main things. So there is the body of claims of knowledge that the community put forward. Then there is a two, the mix of theoretical, experimental, technological resources available to that community to reliably make those claims of knowledge. And thirdly, there are epistemic, methodological principles that the community uses to justify the reliability of the claims advanced. So when we talk about scientific perspective in this context, we are really first of all talking about communities rather than individual agents. And we are talking about historically and culturally situated systems of practices broadly understood to include, as I said, theoretical, but also experimental resources available to that community to advance those claims of knowledge. The question remains because people may ask, well, if our knowledge is always situated, is always a perspective on this historical cultural sense, how is it possible for those communities to come to know the world that is, how is it possible to be realistic about science? And that has been really the key question behind the book. That's why I started writing this book. That's why I got interested in the old topic. Because it seemed to me that really we are so accustomed to the idea of scientific realism as a sort of view from nowhere, God's review, where we have been trained to think about best theories in mature science and how they are approximately true, what I tell us, the true story about what there is. We tend to forget that actually scientific knowledge is always situated, always perspective, or we never have that view from nowhere. We have a view that is beautifully situated because there are wonderfully diverse communities that have over time developed tools and technique and instrument to harvest data, to making inferences from the data to the phenomena, to join the dots between the phenomena and the natural kinds. And through that technique that open up windows or reality, it is through that method that we encounter nature as being populated by more than a robust phenomena. So effectively my book is a project in the epistemology of science, is a way of better understanding how we develop those technique and tools, those situated practices so that we can encounter in the robust, reliable and justifiable way, nature as being does and so. And so the reason of subjectivity, because in a way, if you like the only subjectivity, the subjectivity of historical cultural situated communities, but the beauty of it is that the reliability of science, so these incredible epistemic feet that we call science, is not in spite of this plurality of perspective, by its tanks, so this plurality of perspective. And what I really wanted to show in the book is that this pluralism of perspective is an obstacle, it's not a hurdle to the question about realism, but it's actually the driving edge in of realism. As soon as one relocates questions of realism from a sort of God's view to historically situated communities, I think a different kinds of realism becomes available and obviously spelling out what kind of realism will become available became the project of the book. But yeah, so that's an answer to your question about why there is no risk about the subjectivity as such. Yeah, now that's very helpful. And so it kind of leads to the sort of the usual perspective, no pun intended is what you call the problem of inconsistent models, so a lot of, you know, just, you know, quite opposite from what you just said, typically the idea of a pluralist to view or different perspectives, you know, partial, you know, models that capture parts. It's seen as a problem and you call it the problem of inconsistent models, could you say maybe a bit about what that more much more usual response is to different models and how, how your view, you know, differs from that. So yeah, the problem of inconsistent model is exactly the expression of this tension that I was describing earlier, namely, it's usually presented as a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the kind of realism of our science. And the starting point is the plurality of of scientific models in some areas of inquiry. So the argument would go along the following line. Critics would say, if the purpose of scientific models is to represent specific portions of reality, specific target systems, once you realize that there are areas where there's a plurality of models for the same target system, it becomes quickly clear that we can't really have realism. Or what we can't have is a take on those models as providing us with special access to reality. So the option seems to be other, to be an instrumentalist about models. And so take the model pluralism as just the sensation of different tools to make calculations, get things done, but not really representation of the world or to take the model pluralism seriously about the cost really of giving up on realism altogether. And some of the perspectivalist answer to that kind of objection, thinking of Alex Ruger, for example, have gone along the lines of representational properties. So Alex Ruger is a really interesting argument that he put forward a few years ago, where he said, think of those models as effectively ascribing relational properties to the same target system. So the classical example that people have been developing in the literature goes back to Margaret Morison. She discusses different models for the nucleus. So nuclear physics, if we want to study atomic nucleus, we can use the liquid drop model that describes the atomic nucleus as a drop of incompressible nuclear flow-ed or we can use the shell model that describes the nucleus as a series of shells where problems and neutrons are sitting magic numbers or we can use the fork models that describe the nucleus as a bunch of works to exchange blue ones and so forth. And so the problem with this model is about what is really the nucleus? If you want to be a realist about the nucleus, and I get all these different models that tell me something apparently incompatible or inconsistent about what the nucleus is, how can I ever defend realism about the nucleus? So a possible reply is, well, think of those models as ascribing relational properties, really. So rather than intrinsic monadic properties to the nucleus, but critics have been unimpressed. So people like Margaret Morison, but also Anjan Chakravartin, is a 2017 book on Centuric ontology there. Chapters where they describe our perspectivism is either redundant because it's just a statement of pluralism in science or is kind of buys into some kind of metaphysical inconsistency where the world seems to be some sort of hoj poj of different things that seems to be somehow going together and compatible about the same target system. So what I do very early on in the book is trying to dispel some of the premises on which the problem of inconsistent models seems to be based on. And two of those premises have to do with scientific models and the way we think about models, what models are for, really. The first one is that we tend to think of models as representing as mapping on to reality. I mean, this is a very well entrenched view that models perform their function by mapping on to being as a more thinkable to specific states of affairs. And the second assumption is that we tend to think of the states of affairs as some kind of ontological truth makers that make claims of knowledge a true of false by attributing essential properties to the target system. And what I do in the book is to say, well, it's really only by giving a very, very unduly stringent reading of what models are for that we end up with the problem of inconsistent models. The idea of representing as mapping and the idea that there are those truth makers that make our claims of knowledge a true of false and they have to be understood in terms of us crab being essential properties to the target system. It's not imposed on us. It's not imposed on us unless we buy already into a kind of a strong form of realism, the tend to think of reality as having essential properties and tend to think of models as representing by mapping and tend to think of that representation in terms of us crab being essential properties to the target system. As soon as you bracket off all those assumptions, the problem will consist of model really kind of dissolves in a way. So the problem takes off the ground only because it will advise into strong, scientific, realistic, the kind of dispositional, essentially, the flavor nature. But those assumptions are not imposed upon us. And so as soon as we resist some of those assumptions, then the space open up for developing a different ways of thinking about realism. And so that's the beginning of the journey in a way for the book. Right. So I mean, yeah, it becomes very clear, you argue against that whole kind of essentialist element of at least some forms of realism. So then to kind of follow up on the ontological issue, in the second part of the book, when you sort of focus on the realism. And there are more questions to ask about Perspectival models. But since you raised the issue of essentialism, you distinguish, I mean, following, I guess, Vogue and a Woodward data phenomena. And then how we use our Perspectival models or Perspectival inferences, which, again, you kind of describe, to draw realist conclusions. So that's a lot of things to cover in sort of one question. But let me just sort of summarize that to say, on your view, what are data? What are phenomena? I mean, you would give a very particular view in terms of what you call Motley robust phenomena. And then how do we use these Perspectival models to infer from data to the Motley robust phenomena and then draw our realist conclusions? Sure, thanks. I think, yeah, this is an excellent question. And in a way, they take us to the heart of the book, the second part, where I spell out to the different kind of realism that as he is compatible with the plurality of Perspectives. So as you rightly said, there's been obviously long tradition starting with the empiricist that have normally regarded phenomena as really no match for realism in science. One can't say that one is a realist about science and defend the kind of ontology centered around phenomena, because traditionally phenomena have been regarded as synonymous with appearances. But there has been a trend away from that kind of view that really start with, as you mentioned, book and a woodword distinction between the phenomena to which a large and a more recent work on data by Sabine Leonelli, but also think of here an arching on the idea of how we create phenomena and love by intervening and manipulating cause of properties of objects and so forth. So there has been an important trend, really, over the past 20 years or so, that have. So I'm not creating the space for rethinking phenomena in a different ways. And this is central to my view, because the realism are defending the book, in the second part of the book, is really centered around the notion of phenomena. And I see phenomena as the end product of a long, inferential chain that start with data and has epistemic communities and their situated scientific practices center stage. One thing I didn't mention before, but it's absolutely key to understand my. with the definition of phenomena to which I'll come back in a moment, is a particular way in which I understand the use of a plurality of models. So going back to the example about the atomic nucleus, I was describing earlier, might take on that and any other examples where you have a plurality of scientific models in a play, is that the plurality of model is really functional to explore what's possible in nature about a particular phenomenon of interest. So the role of perspectival models is very much exploratory in allowing us to deliver model knowledge, knowledge about what might be the case. And again, I go back to the metaphor about the perspective in architecture. And so I draw this analogy between the perspectival models and architecture of blueprint as a way of stressing how these models and these model plurality are in particular. is absolutely vital to understand how different communities come together to make relevant and appropriate inferences about the particular phenomena that they want to study. So in a way, lacking architecture, we use blueprints because the blueprints, historically, before the invention of geography, allowed different communities of architects, but also maasons and carpenters and joiners to exchange information and make relevant and appropriate inferences so that they could build a structurally stable house, for example. Similarly, we use plurality of models when we want to make relevant and appropriate inferences to deliver knowledge about what's possible, about the nucleus, for example. How is it possible that some nuclei in nature are most stable than others? This is a story I'll be constructing, one of my three case studies, for example, in the first part of the book. And I give other examples from climate science to the history of developmental psychology. So once you take seriously this idea, the model pluralism and a plurality of perspective is absolutely central to the lever knowledge about what's possible, then I think a different view of phenomena becomes available where the phenomena are not just appearances, they're not fake copies, they're not shadows on the walls, but the phenomena are the seats of the kind of modality that normally scientific realized that tend to outsource to essences or dispositions or cause of powers and so forth. So the view of the phenomena in the part two of the book is that there are stable events that can be identified or we identify, so they are modally robust by a number of different communities in a way that is entirely inferential and entirely perspective. So there are different aspects in this definition. So a bunch of phenomena are stable events, so I understand the notion of stability in a way as synonymous with low likeness. So nature comes to us in the form of events that are stable because they are low like. And the stability of those events is independent of us, is independent of scientific perspective, independent of whatever tools or models or experiments we may run, but for stable events to become phenomena, we need a plurality of epistemic communities that are able to infer them again and again from a plurality of data through perspectival data to phenomena and inferences. So just to give you an example and this is something I discussed in chapter six of the book, think of the expose, right? So when we say that we have discovered the expose, effectively what's going on there is that you have a stable event which is the peak 125-digit electron volt. Now that peak is stable and it's stable because it's low like. So there are loads of nature, there is a resonance mechanism that underpin the stability of that event in nature. The phenomenon is what we call the decay of the expose. So what we are detecting is effectively the decay of that thing into a series of channels. Sometimes there's a two-fort on channels, some other times there's a four-leptons, there are other channels, and you need different communities to be able to make those inferences from the data, the problem-product collisions, the large other colliders, to the stable event in question, the peak 125-digit electron volt, so as to conclude that there is a phenomenon and the decay of the expose. So that's an example of a monolibus phenomenon. So historically when the particle was discovered and by the way we are just celebrating the 10th anniversary of the discovery just this month. Yes, coming up in July. So what happened is that there were these two different teams of scientists, the large other colliders, some of the ACMS, some of the ATLAS. The two machines are different, so the experimental design of the machine is different. They were using the same problem-product collision set, but they made inferences to the same stable event, which is the existence of this peak 125-digit electron volt. So nature comes populated with modally robust phenomena like the decay of the exposed one, but also the pollination of flowers or the echolocation in balougas and many other examples in different domains of inquiry. And what you need really is an ocean of phenomena as modally robust in the sense that we don't need to outsource that modality that normally does the job of realism to essential properties, dispositions, cause of powers or more broadly what Gilbert Rale used to call the heat and going zone. We don't need the heat and going zone. There are no two world views, the world of things that appear and the world of things as they are. All that we have is a world of modally robust phenomena. And I think once we take that stance, we sound the classical, historicist, contingentist, skeptical objection against realism can easily be deflated or averted because in a way, yeah, we have kind of sheltered, I think, realism from those sort of objections. Well, I mean, I'll raise some skeptical anti-realist sort of saying, okay, you can get all these, you can infer to these modally robust phenomena again and again from different perspectives. They sort of converge on a certain amount of what is possible and what is not possible. And, you know, a hardcore, I think, anti-realist would say fine, you know, you all converge. But, you know, as we know from, you know, sort of co-heritists, theories of truth or, you know, anti-foundationist in a epistemology, you know, everybody can agree and yet everybody could be wrong. And so that's sort of, I think at that point, you know, I kind of wonder, you know, I think this is one of the questions I had, was you do an amazing way of defending realism while taking on board robustly all the, you know, quite, you know, valid, you know, worries and concerns and complications from perspectives and perspective, perspective, type of models and all that. But, you know, there seems to be a, you know, I don't know, you know, I guess just a bedrock part where like either we are justified in inferring, you know, to, you know, to a realist commitment or, you know, it's like this is just not enough for me and I'm going to remain, you know, a, you know, constructive empiricist or, you know, some other form of anti-relast. So yeah, so do you have some sort of response to that? Is that just where, you know, at some point, either all these multiple perspectives, you know, that end up in the same place regarding more, more, more motley robust phenomena? Is that, you know, that's enough for realism? Or, you know, is it, you know, is the person who says, no, it's not? Is there really any kind of further response to be given to them? Sure. Yeah. Well, that's an excellent question, right? Where does the realist, the anchor is in all the story about empower phenomena? So for me, the answer lies in the loliqueness of the events. So this is the realist anchor, okay? And obviously there has to be some foundation in any realist project. So mine does away with traditional ideas about essential properties and disposition and causal powers, but take loliqueness as a primitive notion. So I believe that there are loliqueness in nature. And I believe that that level of realism is enough to deliver the kind of realism that we observe in science. This has had the peak count of 25 gigalitron voltage there. It's not going to go away. The bending of the cathode rays, the phenomena. So as I said, for the phenomena, first ontology that are developing the book, I see these two levels in a way, a plane erosion of phenomena. There's a stability of the events and there's the moral robustness. Now, moral robustness, I take it to be a secondary quality. So it's really an expression of how different communities come to infer again and again the same civil events from plurality of datasets. But the loliqueness of the events. the fact that there are events in nature that have low-like dependencies, I take it to be a primitive. So there has to be some foundation in any real history. So most scientific realized that would be happy to delegate that role to causal powers or disposition or whatever. But in my view, the role is placed by low-like dependencies. So there is a 125 giga-lethrum-volt peak, is a stable event in nature. It doesn't depend on scientific perspective. Obviously, we need something as sophisticated as an LHC experiment to be able to detect the peak, that's for sure. But that peak is part of the fabric of nature in my view. And similarly, that there are electrically charged particles that are bent in the presence of a magnetic or electric field. It's also a low-like event in nature. Again, we need the machine and we need cathode waste to be able to see that. But the stable event in itself is where the realist story is. And then the inferentialist, the perspectival aspect is at the level of the modal-yropas phenomena. And I see your point, I see your objections, like how do you strike in the middle ground between the standard scientific realist story that will want more and will want to delegate the realism to causal power, disposition and so forth on one end. And the historicist slash, conventionalist, slash contingentist that will just happily dispense with all of that, including my notion of phenomena and just to go fully coherent with the above all that. Well, one of the attraction of perspectives and really, and actually one of the sources behind the view that developed comes from the epistemology and hern source of work on the perspectival knowledge. And if you think of that tradition, that tradition was developed precisely to strike a middle ground in between a traditional foundationalist view and traditional coerentist view was a way of saying, is it possible to have actually somewhere in between what they called the pyramid and the rafts, right, rafts of coerentism and the pyramid of foundationalism. And so this idea that there are in a way, two levels of knowledge, a level where we have reliable knowledge and a kind of perspectival of scent where we look at the justification for the reliability of the sources of knowledge originates precisely from the attempt of answering those questions about how to go beyond the traditional. foundationalism and coerentism and epistemology, scientific realism, slash, I would say conventionalism when it comes in the philosophy of science. And obviously the tension is there, so I didn't write this book in the hope to persuade the diehard, the metaphysician or the diehard, you know, conventionalism to join the perspectival realist, come, I mean, I'm perfectly aware that people that have a more, I don't know, more robust metaphysical intuition than I ever had, are not going to be moved by some of my arguments. But I guess the purpose of the old book was really constructive, so I was not meant to give any kind of knockdown arguments against the metaphysicians or the conventionalists. I think I give a series of localized, the final localized moves as I go along in the book to explain why I don't buy into essential properties, why I don't buy into full blown contingentism. But really the main purpose of the book was to show that there is a different ways of thinking about realism and try to articulate as clearly as possible where that kind of different form of realism and how that form of realism could be developed. So yeah, it was a kind of positive, positive purpose of the book more than kind of proving that the, you know, the opponents were necessarily wrong in their metaphysical intuition. And most of this, most of these claims when it comes to realism and materialism, you know, we have all, I think, endorsed the kind of bump fras and take on stances, I think. A lot of it, it comes down to stances that people have on metaphysics, on epistemology and so forth. But showing that there is a different way of thinking about realism and how that different ways of form of realism could be explained and tease out was really the main purpose of the book. Right, and I think you, you achieved that in space, let me just following up on that. For me, but I think, you know, probably more generally, you also elaborate within this framework. And I think it's very interesting, again, sort of perspective, you on natural kinds, which you call natural kinds with the human face. And these are, you know, groupings, evolving groupings of phenomena, you know, morally robust phenomena. Can you, can you explain your view of natural kind? Sure, I'll try. It's a book that extends over several chapters from chapters seven to chapter 10 on the book. And it did a big chunk of the book because, as I said, if the purpose was to show that it's possible to think of realism in a different way, engage with the debate on natural kinds, because traditionally, scientific realism has been realism about kinds and those natural divisions in nature that scientific realist attend to associate with a list of necessary and sufficient properties for kind membership. So very often that there has been appeal to macro structural essential properties back to Hillary Patnam. And we want to know what water is. Well, we need to find out the macro structural essential properties. Water is H2O. If we want to know what gold is, we need to look at atomic number. So it's element with atomic number 79. If we want to find out what lemons are, we need to look at the genetic code and identify that and support. And I've been resisting all that. I think a big motivation for the respect that our realism has been really some kind of mistrust of this talk of macro structural essential properties or sensualism in general, especially when it comes about especially when it comes to natural kinds. So the big question for me and probably one of the biggest challenges in writing the book was how to go from this sort of broadly can't you about the phenomenon as more than a robust phenomenon as all that there is to natural kinds, which are the sort of things that scientists talk about. And we don't talk about the phenomenon of the decay of the exposed or we talk about the hiccups on the particle expose and want to know what those what those natural kinds are. And so the viewer developed in the second part of the book is that natural kind of natural kinds with the human face. There is a kind of anti foundational slash noirat boat sort of motivation. So the few that says natural kinds are historically identified and open ended groupings of a more than a robust phenomenon. Really the low like dependency that are the realist underpinning of those all the robust phenomena as I was explaining earlier play an important role in helping different epistemic communities over time to kind of join the dots among the different phenomena. And and allow them to do what I call should conducive conditional supporting inferences to the mobile mouthful saying that we have reliable mechanisms to explain why some phenomena go together and some others don't go together. So the open end so the grouping is open ended is palatable is fully revisable. And that's what we want our natural kinds to be precisely to make them impermeable to the classical skeptical objection that you know, the way stories is the race against realism all along how do you know that we are, you know, how do you know that the electron is real in the past we believe in things like color or flojist or no ether. We now know that it don't exist. How do we know they are our best. The theory is a mature science will know end up like a lot of theory in under the earth on the line. I mean all the sorts of argument really has a bite as soon as we think of natural kinds as carbon natural this joint being identified by micro structure essential properties. But once all that is removed and what you have are more the little best phenomena that historically situated communities have reliably justifiably identified. Insofar as we have a way of showing why someone does phenomena, former groupings and others don't we have a way of. explaining why we have the natural kind that we know and love without that level of certainty or necessity that is vulnerable to the classical historicist objection. And so that's what I try to show in the in in those chapters, but also wanted to defend some intuitions that we have about what natural kinds are really for. For example, you know, again against the microstructural essentialist, it was a news in 2019 that a group of scientists had discovered, have engineered, no discovered, have engineered the akimogy DNA, DNA that consists of eight nucleotides rather than four, and it made the news headlines. And I was thinking, those are important areas where really science is redefining the boundaries of how we think of natural kinds. And we want to make room for those engineer kind that prove to have a very effective naturalness as much as we want to explain why in the past that we used to believe in things like caloric and phlogistone and why we now regard those as what are called empty kinds because there isn't such thing as caloric and either. And so the study of the developed is that every kind is born as in in the making kind. And some of those in the making kind eventually make it and become evolving always in an open-ended and valuable, revisable way. And others become empty kinds. When at some point scientists discovered that some of those phenomena didn't really quite get together, think of the kind of phenomena that were associated with it, right? I mean it was invoked to explain all sorts of things if you read the queries in your terms of the exercise. So it was the medium of let it go. Phenomenum, magnetic phenomenon, obviously optics by it was also invoked for all sorts of physiological phenomena and so forth. So the low likeness is key, right? Here this is again the realist anchor in the story. The ability to identify those low like dependencies that work in the different phenomena and allows different communities to make those inferences are the phenomena really belonging to something that we can call a natural kind or they don't. And if they don't then sometimes what we thought were natural kinds proved to be empty kinds like in the case of caloric or ether. And others will go from strength to strength that will become evolving kind. So that's very broad stroke the story at Helen, chapter 7 to 10. Yeah, no, I mean there's a huge amount of virulent, interesting stuff there and I think I would just encourage listeners to actually go through it and read these chapters to get the finer points. I do want to get to the final chapter. We kind of go where you show sort of where your perspective or realism comes up against what we were talking about earlier about what we're about, you know, subjective objective, those sorts of concerns that are often associated with perspectives. And you talk about, you know, the problem of epistemic injustice as it can appear in this sort of, you know, very, you know, different sort of context than it usually comes up in. So could you just, could you explain a bit about, you know, first of all, I mean, it's clear that different, you know, historical, cultural, epistemic communities will, you know, contribute. But then the injustice appears in the ways and you identify two specific forms of injustice where certain perspectives get left out in a certain way. Can you can you explain that connection between perspective, realism, and epistemic injustice? Sure, thank you. Yeah, I'll do my best. And again, this is the final chapter. It's called the multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in science. And although it's a final chapter, it actually has some of the really main motivations for the book as I outlined at the beginning of the book. I wanted to write a different book about the different ways of thinking about realism for a number of reasons, not just because I had different metaphysical intuition from the standard scientific realized, but actually because I was really interested in questions about multiculturalism in science that seems to have completely escaped the debate about realism and anti-veganism. So traditionally, we tend to think about those debates kind of opening in some sort of idealized, affriccionless plane. We never really think about scientific knowledge production as historically culturally situated as, you know, the knowledge that pertains to specific community, a specific time. And so one of the main motivation for writing the book is to do justice to that situatedness of our scientific knowledge. So going back to the metaphor of perspective that we started with, going back to the first notion of perspective, knowledge that is always from a specific historical cultural vantage point. This is a theme that I developed in the final chapter. And now one of the aspects that I stress about the situatedness and the perspectival nature of our knowledge is that it is really knowledge produced by a plurality of epistemic communities that have, as I say, methodologically intersected and historically interlaced. There's a bit of a jerk on the explaining the book about, I see the dynamics of the different scientific perspective as intersecting and interlacing absolutely central to explain how we produce reliable scientific knowledge over time. So first of all, I wanted to stress the fact that scientific perspective extends well beyond specific geographical, socio-political boundaries. And also the scientific perspective should not be understood as some kind of scientific membership or, you know, scientific homeland in a way. Because if we understand it in a way, then we really risk unjustly cutting out big portions of the society or, you know, important epistemic communities that have historically contributed to scientific knowledge production. So just to give an example, which is again linked to the discussion about natural kinds with a human face and the example about the electron in chapter 10. I think it would be a mistake to think of the, what we tend to call the farademaxual scientific perspective as the exclusive repository of a particular community that was working in a particular historical, culturally situational environment at the time, without taking into account the plurality of other epistemic communities that at the same time were making possible the scientific knowledge production. So the classic example that I give in chapter 10 is that we associate obviously the discovery of the electron with geogetomsen experiment or the Cavani Shlab in 1997 and its ability to identify the charge to mass ratio of what the other time it called the corpusso. But we tend to forget that that tradition of experimenting with cathode rays was really made possible by the flourishing of a glass blowing industry that developed in the second half of the 19th century. We know for example the geogetomsen had a zone of personally trained glass blower, a beneath their ever it, a decavandi Shlab. So you need to, you need that kind of know-how, that kind of often practical and artisanal knowledge that allowed those discovery to take place. And even before that, you need the communities of Scottish crofters in the abridies that were able to burn ashes of seaweed and produce the alkaline flux necessary for the production of glass. And so going back to the issue about epistemic injustice, what I stress in the final part of the book is that once we take seriously the situational of the human knowledge, we need to be careful in not cutting off portions of that seamless interlacing of scientific perspectives that has been pivotal for the ability to advance reliable scientific knowledge. And so part of the motivation of the book was precisely to defend the human point of view as a way of reinstating communities that we tend to forget about when we write narratives about signs and kind of expand your eyes on and look at how those different communities have a fruitfully engaged with one another and interlace with one another to make that knowledge of nature possible. And so whenever we have other and intentional severing of the narrative that excludes those community or worse what we have sometimes a ring fencing of scientific knowledge as if it was the exclusive repository of one community against others, then epistemic injustices arise and what are called epistemic severing and epistemic trademarking. And then the And yeah, I kind of hint towards the end to an alternative way of thinking about all this that doesn't bind to the risk of systemic injustices. So a picture about cosmopolitan science, as a picture of science where it's really a human right that belongs to everyone in virtue of being a citizen of the world. So this is the very, very last section of the book and something that I want to work more in the future. - Good. Well, that does actually bring us to the end of our time. So I like to end with a question about what you are working on in right now as a follow-up to the book or what sorts of projects are you turning to at this point? - Yeah, well, precisely what I was mentioning just a moment ago. So I finished the book and I thought, gosh, I need to write another one, which I don't know whether or when, I'll have the time to write next. In a kind of unexpected way, I ended up getting very interested in debates at the intersection of illegal, political theories on science as a human right. So there's an important debate in that area that normally philosophers of science don't really go into, but it's a debate well known to political theorists and as a setting of philosophers and so forth. And it's a debate that really starts with the declaration of human rights in 1948 that looks as scientific progress as a right, as a human right. And again, it continues in 1966 with the international covenant for economic, social and cultural rights that brings states the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress. So this idea of scientific cosmopolitanism as a science to the benefits of world citizen is something that became very salient while I was writing the book also because we were in the middle of a three-apandemic and the debate about vaccine nationalism obviously became very timely and pressing to everyone's eyes. They found that science is produced in a way that still not only that our epistemic injustice is but big structural socio-economic injustices in accessing the benefits of scientific knowledge. And so this is an area where I hope to write more. So I'll have written a paper now for a special volume on scientific progress edited by Yafan Shahn is coming out in December, just for the short comment in natural physics. There's been published earlier this month they kind of give the broad lines of the area. So yeah. Good work for the future. - Excellent, excellent. Well, that all sounds very exciting. I'm sure a lot of people will be very interested in looking for that work in the future. But yeah, so we are out of time now. So I do wanna thank you again for speaking with us at New Books and Philosophy. It's been a great conversation. And I wish you best of luck with the new work that you're doing as an alt-growth. - Thank you so much, Karri, for having me. And thank you really, very much for this. Really excellent and stimulating question. Thank you. - Okay. - Bye-bye. - Bye. You've been listening to my interview with Michaela Masimi, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. We've been talking about her new book, Perspectival Realism, which is just out from Oxford University Press. I'm Karri Figdor. This is New Books and Philosophy. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. And thank you for listening. (gentle music) [Music]