In mass and social media, writing that comes under the heading of “popular science,” designed to be digestible for the “general public” (although the percentage of those capable of or willing to read such material is likely to be alarmingly and distressingly small), often wildly exaggerates or misleads its readers as to the latest scientific findings, research or experiments. One frequent if not always obvious reason for this has to do with the desire to attract investors (educational and other institutional forms as well as private investors) to fund research or to buy corporate stocks.* This state of affairs is common to biomedicine (e.g., stem cell ‘cures’) and especially one branch of same, the pharmaceutical industry (typically, but not only, with those drugs prescribed for mental illness or disorder), the neurosciences (which promise to unravel the mysteries or nature of consciousness, or ‘explain’ emotional states, even human behavior in general), the computer science field of artificial intelligence (AI) (which makes claims to the effect of replicating human intelligence and reasoning, including moral or ethical reasoning), industrialized (‘scientific’ in an attenuated sense) agriculture (hence the productive or output enhancement provided by herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers), and elsewhere across the sciences (see this compilation on ‘sullied sciences’). This form of science writing often presupposes or assumes science (of European provenance) represents the highest form of human knowledge, that it epitomizes human progress of one kind or another, indeed, that it is itself invariably progressive by nature. (One should not infer from anything said here that I am anti-science or skeptical about science in general: please see my Notes on the Sciences.)
Physics, once crowned “queen of the sciences,” is now christened “king of the sciences.” In keeping with this claim we are asked to, or it is insinuated that we should, subscribe to a hierarchy of the sciences, the physical or natural sciences superior to the social sciences, with those near the pinnacle of the hierarchy providing paradigms or models of scientific procedure and experimentation to be emulated by those below them in this scientific kingdom. This idealized and abstract picture makes mincemeat of the actual procedures and practices of the various sciences, as well as the role of technology as “science in application.” It also ignores the fact that the investigations, explorations, analyses, and explanations provided in the sciences resort to “techniques” that are “extraordinarily diverse, from counting sheep and watching birds to detecting quasars and creating quarks. The epistemic methodologies [what were once called ‘methods’] of research are equally varied, from mental introspection to electronic computation, from quantitative measurement to speculative inference.”
* In other words, utility and market imperatives fuel the ethos and practice of contemporary science to a degree unprecedented in the history of science. As Richard C. Lewontin notes in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), science is “guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time,” that is to say, capitalists.
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This should suffice by way of an introduction to a recent article which I learned of from one of Brian Leiter’s blogs: “New Physics Experiment Indicates There’s No Objective Reality.” At first glance, a weary cyberspace veteran might reasonably believe this breathless headline comes from The Onion, but it does not. What follows is a lightly edited version of the article, but you are invited to read it in toto.
“Someone once said: ‘The world is all that is the case.’ But, is it? Researchers performing a long-awaited experiment created different realities that are irreconcilable, proving that objective facts can be made to exhibit properties that cannot cohere, according to a recent study shared on a preprint server. Sound confusing? You’re not alone in thinking so, as this all involves some pretty complicated physics. But in short, the takeaway is this: Reality is at odds with itself.
Nobel Prize-winner Eugene Wigner described a thought experiment in 1961 that highlighted an uncommon paradox of quantum mechanics. Specifically, it reveals the strangeness of the universe when two observers, like Wigner and his friend, observe two distinct realities. Since the thought experiment, physicists have used it to explore the very nature of measurement, in addition to the bizarre idea of whether objective facts actually exist or not. This is a pretty crucial feature of science, since empirical inquiry works to establish objective facts. [….]
In 2020, physicists realized that recent quantum technology advances had made it possible to create Wigner’s Friend test in a real-world experiment. In essence, we can create different realities, and compare them in a lab to see if they can be reconciled, or cohere, in one system. And researcher Massimiliano Proietti of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, along with a handful of researchers, said they performed this long-awaited experiment for the first time: Creating distinct realities, compare-and-contrasting them, and discovering that they are, in fact, irreconcilable. [….]
In his thought experiment, Wigner imagined a friend measuring the state of a photon in a different lab and recording the result while Wigner watched from afar. He has no clue what his friend’s measurement is, and is thus forced to assume that the photon and its measurement are in a state of superposition of every possible outcome for the experiment.
Wigner can say, however, that the ‘fact’ of the superposition’s existence is real. And, strangely, this state of affairs suggests that the measurement can’t have taken place. Obviously, this stands in direct contradiction to Wigner’s friend’s point-of-view, who just measured and recorded the photon’s polarization. He can even call Wigner and tell him the measurement was taken, without revealing the results. This means there are two realities at odds with one another, and it ‘calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,’ [emphasis added] explained Proietti and colleagues, in an MIT Technology Review report. And the new research reproduced Wigner’s thought experiment by using entanglement techniques for many particles at the same time.
[This experiment] raised some baffling questions that have forced physicists to confront the nature of reality. There might be a loophole to some assumptions that made this unknowable reality conclusion necessary, but if everything holds up to future scrutiny, it turns out reality does not exist. [emphasis added] So the next time your friends think something is or isn’t the case, consider interjecting with an argument from quantum physics: they’re both wrong, and so are you, because even the simple fact of the disagreement itself is just another illusion.”
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While the claim in the headline is at the very least rhetorically provocative, the experiments described hardly indicate that for most of us, most of the time, there is not, in fact, an “objective reality,” or that, there is, in at least some senses of the phrase as we understand it, an “objective—and even ‘ultimate’—reality,” one of those senses having to do with our fundamental orientation toward or disposition to, truth, in accord with our belief that there is such a thing as truth. The article does not state a conclusion—“there is no objective reality”—warranted by the evidence. As Tim Maudlin states in the comments at Leiter Reports, “obviously no experiment can prove [or even provide evidence for the proposition that] there is no ‘objective reality.’”
The presupposed, assumed or presumptive claim in this article is that physics (a ‘natural’ science) is capable of answering what are in effect metaphysical questions with regard to the nature of reality (the answers to which of course widely vary), or that metaphysics or philosophy generally for that matter, should defer in such matters to the findings of physics, which are in any case always provisional (this has a ‘theoretical’ status and classification, like observation, is a ‘theory-laden’ activity), even if for some epistemic or scientific reasons and purposes, cumulative. Of course none of this rules out the possibility that for most of us, most of the time, what is seen or understood as “objective reality” is in fact our perspective on same, our subjective take, as it were, on this reality (in scientific language, Ronald N. Giere terms this ‘perspectival realism’). With regard to the philosophy of science and science studies, we make the same point by acknowledging, with Philip Kitcher in Science, Truth and Democracy (2001) and Giere earlier in Science without Laws (1999) that the nature of scientific representation intrinsic to theories is on the order of maps:
“Maps have many of the representational features we need for understanding how scientists represent the world. There is no such thing as a universal map [one reason why Kitcher says we cannot have a ‘Theory of Everything,’ for an ‘ideal atlas is a myth’]. Neither does it make sense to question whether a map is true or false. The representational virtues of maps are different. A map may, for example, be more or less accurate, more or less detailed, of smaller or larger scale. Maps require a large background of human convention for their production and use. Without such they are no more than lines on paper. Nevertheless, maps do manage to correspond in various ways with the real world. Their representational powers can be attested by anyone who has used a map when traveling in unfamiliar territory.”
Both Giere’s “perspectival realism” and “modest realism” leave us with a (soft) concept of “objective reality,” one that is not wholly severed from that which is subjective, from subjectivity. Kitcher’s discussion of “mapping reality” on behalf of a “modest realism” wisely aims to retain the notion (in significant and sufficient measure or degree) of a “mind-independent” reality or robust conception of objectivity while acknowledging such things as the underdetermination of theory by evidence. In Kitcher’s words, “There is all the difference between organizing thought and speech, and making reality: ... we should not confuse the possibility of constructing representations with that of constructing the world.” Or, as Helen Longino aptly puts it, “one can be a realist in the sense of holding that there is a world independently of our thinking that there is one, without being a scientific realist in the sense of holding that the successes of our best theories consists in the world having exactly the features attributed to it by those theories.”
Our third and final illustration of this is from a vantage point from science that comes from the late physicist John Ziman:
“Almost every general statement one can make about scientific theories is equally applicable to maps. They are representations of a supposed ‘reality.’ They are social instruments. They abstract, classify and simplify numerous ‘facts.’ They are functional. They require skilled interpretation. And so on. The analogy is evidently much more than a vivid metaphor. [….] It is clear that scientific maps, models, metaphors, themata and other analogies are not just tools of thought, or figures of speech. They are of the very substance of scientific theory. As sources of meaning and understanding, they stand on an equal footing with explicit verbal and symbolic representations.”
To be sure, “perspectival” and “modest” realism are still species of realism, yet there is no longer the hard and fast metaphysical commitment to the idea of science as describing things “out there”—objects or not—as they really, definitively or truly are, as giving us the definitive account of how the world, simply and absolutely, in fact is. In other words, if our physicists conclude from their experiment(s) that “there is no objective reality,” this is merely a scientific theory characterizing “reality” as conceived by physicists, not a characterization of (objective) reality for the rest of us. This modest scientific realism is perfectly compatible with the complementary search for knowledge and truth (and the nature or meaning of ‘reality’) in the motley religious and non-religious worldviews around our planet: in short, we may discover that metaphysical pluralism and epistemic relativism or perspectivalism is perfectly consistent with generalizable and pragmatic or “soft” realism about truth and our regnant, everyday conception(s) of and reliance upon “objective reality.” With ample reason, Hilary Putnam warned us against confusing scientific realism with metaphysical realism.
With Hilary Putnam, consider one analogical lesson from the Copenhagen School in physics, specifically, Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, which enables us to appreciate the concept and possibility of complementarity, for “even ‘the empirical world,’ the world of our experience, cannot be adequately or completely described with just one picture, according to Bohr. Instead, we have to make a ‘complementary’ use of different classical pictures—wave pictures in some experimental situations, particle pictures in others—and give up the idea of a single picturable account to cover all situations.” The fact that we cannot adequately or completely describe our “objective” or empirical world with “just one concept,” does not rule out the regulative role played by the idea of an “objective reality” in everyday life, for it is not the case that the converse holds: anything goes!
Another way to make our point about the relative significance of the conclusion drawn by these physicists is to consider what counts as a scientific “fact:
“It is a philosophical fantasy to suppose that a scientific [or empirical] ‘fact’ can be freed from the context in which it was observed. That context always contains both ‘theoretical’ and ‘subjective’ features, usually closely intertwined. A sophisticated instrument embodies many theoretical concepts. But these are only elaborations and extensions of the theories needed by a trained observer to ‘see’ what is scientifically significant in her personal experience of the world. And thus it is the case that even the most empirical research findings are saturated with theoretical notions and targeted on specific theoretical issues.”
The scientific facts produced in physics and the natural sciences generally are not metaphysically, ontologically, or epistemically privileged vis-à-vis the knowledge provided by social scientists or even those working in the humanities. As Ziman reminds us, these fields of intellectual inquiry
“[no] doubt ... differ enormously in their subject matter, their intellectual objectives, their practical capabilities, and their social and psychic functions. Nevertheless, they belong to the same culture, and operate institutionally under the same ethos. As a consequence, the knowledge produced by the natural sciences is no more ‘objective,’ and no less ‘hermeneutic,’ than the knowledge produced by the social, behavioral and other human sciences. In the last analysis, they are all of equal epistemological weight.”
Philosophers too can appreciate differing perspectives on reality, relative truths, and metaphysical pluralism as perfectly compatible or consistent with a modest or soft notion of “objective reality,” as Michael Lynch exemplifies in Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity (1998) and Truth as One and Many (2009). For Lynch, metaphysical pluralism is in fact compatible with realism of a kind, for he argues that we need not be anti-realists in claiming that propositions and facts concerning the nature of reality are relative to conceptual schemes of worldviews. Consider the following snippets from the arguments that have led Lynch to this conclusion:
- “The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.”
- [I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid-like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are … flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a non-pejorative sense; they have what Waismann called ‘open texture.’
- Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, ‘radically non-epistemic;’ that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.
- [T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.”
- “Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.”
- “Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.”
- “All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.”
- “Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.”
Hilary Putnam taught us that there is no “unique and complete description of the world in some metaphysically privileged vocabulary,” and that includes the language of the natural sciences and physics in particular (which is most often thought to possess such a vocabulary), and so a pronouncement on the nature of reality from our physicists falls within the ambit of Putnam’s sound argument and compelling conclusion. And with the Jains, we might come to better appreciate that what we consider “objective reality” is many-sided and viewed from many different and often clashing perspectives that are thus not always consistent with each other or do not even provide some kind of minimal coherence, at least as far as we can ascertain … and there’s the rub: as far as we can ascertain suggests the intrinsic limits or constraints on our pursuit of knowledge, and thus there may be, practically (as a regulative idea or ideal) and metaphysically speaking, an “objective reality,” but one we cannot fully grasp (assuming we lack the power of omniscience). In any case, physics cannot provide us with definitive answers to our questions about the nature or existence of objective and ultimate reality. In the words of my late dear teacher and friend, Nandini Iyer,
“To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate “true” metaphysical descriptions of the world does not … necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this ‘real’ or ‘true’ world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. [....] The conceptual frameworks we build in the realm of rational thought are not useless just because they cannot describe Ultimate Reality. Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.”
Consider, too, in the spirit of Iyer’s passage, how a Jain philosopher in particular might deal with this subject matter, namely, within the metaphysical framework of the notion of anekāntavāda (literally, ‘non-one-sided,’ but we might helpfully translate it as ‘non-absolutism’), which deals with questions of epistemic and metaphysical pluralism and thus relative truths (while not denying absolute truth; this is not to be confused with that species of philosophical relativism which either denies the significance of what we commonly call truth, or believes that truth is purely conventional). This Jain (in the first instance) metaphysical and ontological doctrine has come to be elaborated in conjunction with two corollary doctrines: nayavāda (a theory of perspectives) and syāvāda (literally, the ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps’ doctrine, understood as the practice of seven-fold or conditional predication). In effect, these three “doctrines of reality” are thought to be sufficiently sensitive to the undeniable fact that reality or existence is incredibly and irreducibly complex. The “objective reality” assumed by our physicists and thought to be in jeopardy is thus best approached from a variety of partial perspectives, all of which might be considered in one sense or another, more or less correct, but none of which can claim to be equally or fully correct or true.
We will have to leave aside the fact that the Jains also believe in the possibility of a special kind of mystical (or mystical-like) knowledge or awareness which is the prerogative of the kevalajñāna, that spiritually accomplished individual who attains the omniscience of a kevalin, or an enlightened being (hence one can realize, so to speak, absolute truth), such as Vardhamāna Mahāvīra (however, there is no creator deity in Jainism). It should be noted that a similar claim for “omniscience” of a kind is made for the Buddha (Sara McClintock notes that Jainism is ‘among the earliest systematic defenders of the notion, probably inspiring some later Buddhist arguments’), as well as for deities in several other Indic religio-philosophical schools (e.g., the Naiyāyikas hold that the creator God, Īśvara, is omniscient by nature, and the Sāmkhyas accorded omniscient status to Lord Īśvara, although he is not a creator deity in this system).
In Jain epistemology, there are two kinds of valid methods for gaining knowledge: pratyakṣa or “direct knowledge” and parokṣa or “indirect knowledge,” and only kevalajñāna is considered pratyakṣa, hence it is the merited privilege, to date, of only a very small class of human beings, although it “is believed to be an intrinsic quality of all souls,” and thus in principle at least, something attainable by any of us. For practical purposes, our pursuits of knowledge are on the order of parokṣa or “indirect knowledge.” Thus anekāntavāda represents, in one sense, the (provisional yet unavoidable) reality of parokṣa or indirect knowledge, which applies to all but the kevalin. In another sense, it could be said to be a by-product of pratyakṣa, for our doctrines might be said to originate from the vantage point or direct knowledge provided by omniscience, and thus our three doctrines are true insofar as they depend or are contingent upon the attainment of omniscience. Anekāntavāda is defined by Matilal as the “theory of non-onesidedness [of reality],” or, “to be more specific, ‘the theory of the many-sided nature of reality.’” Anekāntavāda is best understood as a (a) metaphysical doctrine or the Jain view of reality, and (b) a strategic method in philosophy, one that encourages or allows for reconciliation, integration, and synthesis of heretofore conflicting philosophical views (and in our case, conflicting views in physics). This method relies on nayavāda, the “doctrine of standpoints,” and saptibhangi-naya, the “doctrine of seven-fold predication.” We can bracket or set aside the claims for omniscience if need be and still appreciate the possible metaphysical and epistemic virtues outlined here and their possible relevance for a philosophy of science capable of making sense of the sort of thought- and real-world experiments conducted by the physicists in our article.
Further reading: Please see Scott R. Stroud’s article, “Anekāntavāda and Engaged Rhetorical Pluralism: Explicating Jain Views on Perspectivism, Violence, and Rhetoric,” available here, as well as the works by J. Ganeri, P. Jaini, J. Long, B.K. Matilal, and A. Sen in his list of References.