In his paper “Speaking of Facts: or, Reality without Realism,” Paul Roth criticizes the arguments I present in my work “A Deceiving Resemblance: Realism Debates in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Historiography”.[1] Roth’s critique of my position in his paper reveals several fundamental issues that are symptomatic of broader issues in philosophy of historiography.
As this is a response paper, I assume the reader is familiar with both works and I will not repeat the main formulations of scientific realism and the Ideal Chronicler that I discuss below.
First, Roth incorrectly attributes the formulation of scientific realism’s theses to me, when in fact these are standard formulations in the philosophy of science. I refer, in the article, to formulations by Stathis Psillos.[2] This misattribution demonstrates a lack of familiarity with the established debates in scientific realism, which is precisely the point I aim to highlight in my comparison of scientific and historical realism debates.
When it comes to argumentative details, Roth criticizes the semantic and epistemic theses of scientific realism on the basis of their supposed lack of philosophical content and trivial logical relationship. However, this critique misses the nuanced and substantive nature of these theses.
Psillos’s use of “putative factual reference” – a phrase Roth attacks – in the semantic thesis is deliberate and meaningful. This term reflects the fallibility of scientific knowledge, the theory-ladenness of observation, the possibility of reference failure, and the ongoing nature of scientific inquiry. By using “putative,” Psillos shows how to formulate a realist position despite these philosophical complexities. Sometimes reference fails in scientific theories, but this does not mean that we cannot have successful reference; hence the term “putative”.
Regarding the relationship between the semantic and epistemic theses, Roth misunderstands their different roles in the formulation of scientific realism. The semantic thesis concerns the nature of scientific theories as truth-conditioned descriptions, while the epistemic thesis addresses our justification for believing these theories.
The epistemic thesis specifies which theories are relevant to the scientific realism debate, makes claims about their epistemic status, and asserts they are “approximately true,” not just truth-apt. It also implies that success provides reason to believe in a theory’s truth. These are substantive philosophical claims that go beyond the semantic thesis. They make a bold assertion about our ability to gain knowledge about unobservables in science. Roth’s failure to recognize these nuances exemplifies the gap between discussions of realism in philosophy of historiography and the more developed debates in philosophy of science. Surely, Roth can argue against the theses, but one cannot simply misread the theses and their interrelations and then abandon them on the basis of such reading.
Second, when it comes to the Ideal Chronicle argument, Roth severely misrepresents my position. He claims that I analyze “The Thirty Years War began in 1618” as a relational statement “Bxy – x began at y”. This is a complete fabrication; I never proposed such an analysis. My actual argument is far more nuanced than Roth suggests. I contend that this statement can be understood as asserting the existence of an event that occurred in 1618, which stands in certain relations to a set of other events collectively constituting what we refer to as the Thirty Years War.
This understanding does not treat “The Thirty Years War” as a simple named entity in a binary relation (Bxy), nor does it ascribe a monadic property of “being the beginning of the Thirty Years War” to the 1618 event. Instead, it explicates the complex relational structure underlying our historical statements. These relations are often cross-temporal and the Ideal Chronicler has no access to them by definition.
These misrepresentations, along with the earlier mistake of attributing standard formulations of scientific realism to me personally, demonstrate a troubling lack of engagement with both the specifics of my argument and the broader context of the scientific realism debate. This reinforces my main thesis: discussions of realism in philosophy of historiography often lack the rigor and familiarity with established arguments that characterize similar debates in philosophy of science.
Roth’s critique, by failing to engage with the nuances of scientific realism and misrepresenting my arguments, inadvertently strengthens my case. It illustrates how the gap in understanding between these two fields blocks productive discussion about the nature of historical knowledge and its relation to scientific knowledge. This is precisely the issue I seek to address in my work as I demand a more informed and nuanced approach to realism debates in philosophy of historiography.
[1] Paul A. Roth, “Speaking of Facts: or, Reality without Realism,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 18 (2024): 152-172; Veli Virmajoki, “A Deceiving Resemblance: Realism Debates in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Historiography,” in The Poverty of Anti-realism: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History, edited by Tor Egil Førland and Branko Mitrović, 25-50. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023.
[2] Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (Routledge, 1999).