This post is based on an argument that was left out from my 2018 paper “Could Science Be Interestingly Different?”. I am happy to hear how one could untangle the No Miracles Argument and the contingency-debate, so please let me know.

—

The discussion about the contingency/inevitability problem has received much attention recently.[1] The debate between inevitabilists and contingentists concerns the question “Could science be different from what it actually is or is it necessary that science has certain core features that it in fact has?” Inevitabilists argue that it is necessary that science has those features while contingentists argue that science could have different features.

The problem is usually formulated as concerning the possibility of equally successful but fundamentally different science. Hacking writes:

“I asked: How inevitable are the results of successful science? Take any result R, which at present we take to be correct, of any successful science. We ask: If the results of a scientific investigation are correct, would any investigation of roughly the same subject matter, if successful, at least implicitly contain or imply the same results? If so, there is a significant sense in which the results are inevitable.” (2000, 61.)

Léna Soler defines contingentism and inevitabilism as follows (2008, 233 [the bullet points are from the original]):

Contingentism:

• more or less the same initial conditions obtain as those which have occurred in the history of our own science;
• nevertheless, the possibility, as ‘final’ (subsequent or later) conditions, at least in the long run, of an alternative physics,
  • as successful and progressive as ours, and
  • which yields results irreducibly different from ours (notably which involves an ontology incompatible with ours).

Inevitabilism:

• if more or less the same initial conditions obtain as those which have occurred in the history of our own science;
• and a successful and progressive physics has indeed been developed;
• then, inevitably, as ‘final’ (subsequent or later) conditions, at least in the long run:
  • more or less the same results and the same ontology as our own,
  • or different but reconcilable results and ontologies as our own.

There is a serious problem with the definitions of the contingency/inevitability problem that refer to equal success. One major argument that scientific realists use is the so-called No Miracles Argument (NMA). This argument is simple but powerful:

The success of science would be a miracle if the mature theories of science were not true and if the entities and/or the structures they describe did not exist. There are no miracles. Thus the mature scientific theories are true and the entities and/or the structures they describe exist.[2]

If this argument stands its ground, there can be no alternative successful science that “involves an ontology incompatible with ours”. The problem is that the NMA must be false if the discussion about the possibility of an equally successful but fundamentally different science is to proceed. If NMA holds its ground, the success of a theory indicates that the theory is (approximately true). If we had two theories that were both successful but fundamentally different, then we would need to allow that two fundamentally different theories could both be true.  We should notice that the literature surrounding NMA is enormous – the inference form success to truth is at core of the realism-debate. It does not seem plausible that the NMA collapses anytime soon. Thus, the discussion about the contingency-inevitability problem becomes a hostage of NMA.^[3]

References

Hacking, Ian (2000). “How inevitable are the results of successful science?”. Philosophy of Science 67 (3). 58–71

Kinzel, Katherina (2015A). “State of the field: Are the results of science contingent or inevitable?”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 52. 55–66

Psillos, Stathis (1999). Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. Routledge.

Sankey, Howard (2008). “Scientific realism and the inevitability of science.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (2). 259–264

Soler, Léna (2008). “Revealing the analytical structure and some intrinsic major difficulties of the contingentist/inevitabilist issue”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (2). 230–241

Soler, Léna & Trizio, Emiliano & Pickering, Andrew (2015). Science As It Could Have Been. Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem. University of Pittsburgh Press.

See also

Isis, vol. 99 (3), 2008.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, vol. 39 (2), 2008.

---

[1] In 2008, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science and Isis both devoted a special issue on this topic. In 2015, a book named Science as It Could Have Been: Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem was published and it included a variety of articles devoted to the issue. Kinzel (2015) is a helpful guide to the debate.

[2] See Psillos 1999, chap. 4.

[3] Of course this does not mean that the C-I-debate and discussion about scientific realism are not different issues in general. (See e.g. Soler & al. (2015, part II), Soler (2008) and Sankey (2008).)