Scientific pluralism and metaphysics
Whatmakes someone a scientific pluralist? One path is to aim at a unique and objective description of the natural world, but to find that the world is itself disunified and plural. Accurate description then would require multiple accounts. It is also possible to be a metaphysical monist, believing in the unity of nature, and still argue for pluralism on the basis of the limitations of our knowledge and viewpoint. We do not know, with certainty, that our representations of theworld are accurate, so it would be good, it could be argued, to hedge our bets and leave open multiple lines of inquiry. Furthermore, whether or not our representations are successful or not depends on our goals and our interests. We have then, realist epistemology with pluralistic metaphysics on the one hand, or pluralist epistemology and monistic metaphysics on the other. In addition to these extremes, there are mixed accounts that provide a basis for scientific pluralism. The recent literature on scientific pluralism is itself quite heterogeneous, taking different stands on both the epistemological and the metaphysical issues. Ruphy's book is a compilation and reworking of material, much of it originally published in English in journals and then unified as a book in French (Ruphy, 2013) before being reworked again to become the current work in English. The overall question is whether contemporary arguments for scientific pluralism reach too far, making metaphysical claims that cannot be justified. Ruphy aims to clarify issues and to present her own thesis of scientific pluralism, without claiming to have presented an exhaustive analysis of all possible positions. Thus, while the presentation in the book is structured, it analyzes the works of major players in the contemporary literature on scientific pluralism, rather than positions. The extent to which she engages the work of what has been called the Stanford School of the Philosophy of Science is striking. Ruphy not only mentions Patrick Suppes' very early article on scientific pluralism (Suppes, 1978) and discusses the central works of Dupre (1993) and Cartwright (1999) but she also relies heavily on Ian Hacking's styles of reasoning in developing her own view