Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 59 (2016) 68e73
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Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Introduction: Testing philosophical theories
Chris Haufe
Case Western Reserve University, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 29 June 2016
Available online 12 July 2016
Keywords:
Testing structural realism
Structural realism
Philosophical theories
The studies featured in this issue are the result of a conference
held at Case Western Reserve University in June 2014 in an attempt
to begin reviving an unfortunately neglected approach to the study
of science. The conference, Testing Structural Realism, asked each
participant to present two arguments: (1) an argument for what we
should expect to see in the historical record if (some aspect of)
Structural Realism is true; and (2) an argument for whether or not
the historical record bears out those expectations.
While the specic focus of this conference was the relation
between Structural Realism and the history of science, the funda-
mental hope was to help reinvigorate a general approach to the
philosophical study of science pioneered by the Larry and Rachel
Laudan in the 1980s. By way of introducing the studies that came
out of the conference, and by way of introducing the general
approach, I review and expand upon the Laudans original moti-
vations described in their 1986 article, Scientic Change: Philo-
sophical Models and Historical Research, and their introduction to
the volume that resulted from their own conference at Virginia
Tech nearly 30 years ago. I then address in detail the central puzzles
raised by holding philosophical theories empirically accountable
while simultaneously taking them to possess normative
signicance.
1. Motivating the testing approach
In their contribution to the issue, Rachel and Larry Laudan
present a retrospective on the developments in philosophy of sci-
ence that fueled their efforts to devise and organize empirical tests
E-mail address: haufe@case.edu.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2016.06.004
0039-3681/ 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
of key features of then-dominant philosophical theories of scien-
tic change, the practical details involved in those efforts, and the
intended consequences for the HPS research community. The
Laudans call to initiate a more empirically responsible philosophy
of science rst appeared in a co-authored article published in
Synthese in 1986, with a more rened version appearing later as the
rst chapter of their conference volume, Scrutinizing Science (1988).
There they identied four principle motivations for adopting the
testing approach: (1) intellectual honesty; (2) promoting coherence
and direction within the HPS research community; (3) consensus-
building; and (4) probative value. I want to discuss each of these
motivations in turn, with an eye toward clarifying the privileged
position of empirical testing with respect to addressing them.
Pieties about the importance of empirical testing must give way
to the particularities of the testing process itself. The promissory
notes of the sixties and seventies have now fallen due. Either we
now decide how to test these models and proceed to do so, or
we must give up any pretense that we have even the imsiest
warrant for believing that science is the way we claim it to be.
Sloganeering on behalf of naturalism in epistemology must now
give way to the real thing, or we must come clean about just
what alternative (extra-empirical) epistemic status we intend
our theorizing about science to enjoy (Laudan et al., 1986: 143)
Philosophers of science generally regard science as epistemi-
cally special, a status which it enjoys in large part on account of its
epistemically privileged principles of inference. Perhaps the main
thrust of the Synthese article was that this commitment has
important potential consequences for how philosophers of science
ought to approach their own research. If were of the opinion that
empirical testing is part of what makes scientic knowledge
capable of achieving its unique degree of well-foundedness, then it
should strike us that philosophical knowledge d be it of science or
anything else d approaches that degree of well-foundedness only
to the extent that it too employs empirical testing. The same lesson
follows for any of the methods of inquiry we regard as integral to
sciences special epistemic status. And, of course, many of those
methods are and had been already widely applied across within
philosophy, long before there was any species of inquiry that
answered to the name science. But empirical testing, at least in our
own time, stands out as importantly different from other
 C. Haufe / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 59 (2016) 68e73
dimensions of scientic inquiry with respect to the kind of infer-
ential support it provides. Scientic claims that have not been
subject to empirical test are standardly seen as lacking something
of major epistemic signicance. The Laudan group plausibly un-
derstood this to be a consequence of the general signicance of
empirical testing, rather than something peculiar to nature of sci-
entic knowledge. In other words, scientic claims are not the only
claims whose well-foundedness is weakened by the absence of
empirical testing; all claims are vulnerable in this way. It follows
pretty straightforwardly from this set of commitments that phi-
losophers of science need to either demote the epistemic signi-
cance of empirical testing in science, or get to work testing their
own theories.
Much of the Laudan groups motivation for promoting empirical
testing was, as they said, to encourage a greater sense of coherence
and direction among scholars interested in the interdisciplinary
study of scientic change (Donovan, Laudan, & Laudan, 1992: xi).
They placed the blame for science studies lack of research coher-
ence on several features of the way in which the communitys
research efforts were organized. The major problem here, as they
then saw it, was that philosophy was populated exclusively by
theoreticians1 engaged in a struggle of all against all,2 resulting
in interminable philosophical contest3 that made it impossible
for debate within the community to develop past the most em-
bryonic stages of serious rational inquiry. Elsewhere, Larry Laudan
would point to the compounding fact that philosophers were
monumentally unconcerned to show the superiority of their
philosophical theories by standards different from the ones that
they themselves profess, a disciplinary norm that contrasted
strongly with standards of scientic debate, where scientists are
concerned to show that theories satisfy all the relevant standards
invoked by respectable scientists, even if they themselves do not
subscribe to those standards (Laudan and Laudan 1989; Laudan,
1992: 100e101, drawing on Laudan and Laudan 1989).
If the problem within philosophy was the epicyclic decadence of
unanchored pontication, historians of science had sinned in pre-
cisely the opposite direction, producing pointillist accounts of the
history of science that were too narrowly focused to allow for
connection to more general themes about the nature of science:
while the history of science is today being written to a very high
standard of scholarship, it has become increasingly isolated
from the interpretive tradition that gave it birth and which is
still uniquely capable of giving its ndings a signicance that
transcends disciplinary bounds. This withdrawal into a partic-
ularist view of history has seriously weakened both the history
of science and the effort to develop a more adequate theory of
science (Laudan et al., 1986: 150).
The Laudan group described the turn toward microhistory as
especially bizarre in the history of science, for it is science, more
than any other aspect of modern culture, that has advanced by
insisting on the primacy of the general over the particular
(Donovan et al., 1992: xix). Of all people, historians of science ought
to have been wise enough to resist the wider disciplinary trend
toward hyper-particularization. The predictable result of this trend
was a collection of rst-rate studies in the history of science that
had no obvious relevance to one another and that were, because of
their emphasis on specic features of social and cultural context,
uncongenial to an approach to the philosophy of science that was
predominantly epistemic in its orientation.
1
Laudan et al. 1986: 148.
2
Donovan et al., 1992: xiii.
3
Laudan et al. 1986: 153.
69
With the philosophers devoting all of their scholarly energy to
out-theorizing each other, and the historians apparently uncon-
cerned with bringing theory to bear on their own subjects, or with
bringing their own subjects to bear on theory, the Laudan group
worried that it would not be possible to replicate to even a modest
degree the progressive dynamism well-known to the natural
sciences (Donovan et al., 1992: xii). For them, the rst step toward
developing a similar tradition within HPS was to establish some
sort of consensus upon which the scholarly community could build
and move forward. The mere existence of widespread scholarly
agreement d regardless of what the agreement was about d
would be a signicant achievement for the HPS community in that
it could serve as a platform for further development of HPS research
programs, much in the same way that consensus functions in sci-
ence. After the scientic community comes to general agreement
on some item of controversy, that agreement functions as a
(defeasible) constraint on the sorts of claims about nature that can
be regarded as scientically credible. Scientic research commu-
nities acquire coherence and direction through the gradual accu-
mulation of these agreements, which result in progressively more
general claims about nature that are then subject to further test.
By contrast, they claimed, [s]cience studies is currently char-
acterized by extreme freedom in the formulation of hypotheses .,
preventing the kind of disciplinary cohesion and progressiveness
that is made possible by the freedom-constraining effects of
consensus (Donovan et al., 1992: xiii). Here it is interesting to see
what many would regard as the key to scientic progress d in-
tellectual freedom d held up by the Laudan group as a principal
impediment to the development of HPS into a mature and valuable
research tradition, a contrast familiar from Kuhns SSR. Whether or
not one shares the groups esteem for and vision of a progressive
HPS community, there is something clearly right about their sug-
gestion that its lack of progress is at least partly due to the absence
of consensus and the manifest disinterest in achieving it.
But how was empirical testing going to help with any of this? In
their prefatory material, we can see two important epistemic roles
for testing envisioned by the Laudan group. The rst, interestingly
pragmatic, role would have been to provide an increase in focus to
research in philosophy of science. By distracting some philosophers
of science away from novel theorizing and toward testing, we
would thereby relax the pace at which new theories are generated
and thus lessen the severity of one of the chief obstacles facing
disciplinary cohesion and directionality. The second more sub-
stantive role would have been to, quite plainly, introduce some
form of genuine experimental control into philosophy:
The role of experimental control has been assumed in philoso-
phy by critical commentary and discussion conducted by theo-
reticians responding to the challenge of competing ideas.
Philosophy as a discipline has not owned up to the need for a
form of experimental control which, like that of science proper,
is relatively autonomous from theorizing and anchors its critical
standards in material external to its own theoretical literature
(Laudan et al., 1986: 148).
As they saw it, this had led to
a serious epistemic problem which needs to be squarely faced.
Although the new theories of science are interesting and pro-
vocative, the evidence for their soundness is much too imsy for
describing whole disciplines or sub-disciplines (Laudan, Laudan,
& Donovan, 1992: 7).
Through its relative autonomy from the theories it is used to test,
experimental data is in a unique position to help compel theories to
fall in line. It thus helps to promote cohesion and directionality in
70 C. Haufe / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 59 (2016) 68e73
the research community by functioning as the foundation upon
which theoretical consensus can be built.
One interesting feature of the Laudan groups motivational texts
was the noticeable absence of an effort to elaborate on the philo-
sophical foundations of the epistemic signicance of empirical
testing. Each attempt to highlight the importance of testing for
improving the well-foundedness of philosophical theories is made
by noting testings important role in the epistemology of science;
the same is true for consensus and for the search for general pat-
terns, both highlighted above. They took the close and widely
acknowledged association of each of these with the unparalleled
success of science to be sufcient to recommend their epistemic
priority in the history and philosophy of science. Perhaps this is a
predictable feature of the groups epistemological naturalism. For,
on their view, what recommendation of a methodology could be
more powerful and more justied than one that tied it directly to
the success of science? One could endeavor to explain how a
methodology helps to make science so successful, but it is debat-
able whether, on the naturalist view, one would thereby have
provided additional support for that methodologys merit. My own
suspicion is that the Laudan group assumed that the epistemic
credentials of testing, consensus, and generalization would have
been too obvious to members of the science studies community to
belabor the point.
Whatever those epistemic merits are, they do not seem to have
been meritorious enough to, as Kuhn says, attract an enduring
group of adherents away from competing modes of philosophical
activity (Kuhn, 1962: 10). Already in the late 80s, as they well knew,
the mass conversion of historians of science to social and cultural
microhistory was going to make any fruitful reunication of the
history and philosophy of science a serious challenge. But the re-
action (and lack of reaction) among philosophers of science sug-
gests that the philosophers were just as unwilling to participate.
Despite the occasional salutary nod (Hull, 1998) or measured
assessment (Nickles, 1995), philosophers of science have been
distinctly unsympathetic to the Laudan groups approach, to the
extent that they are even aware of it.
As philosophers and historians of science, we are predictably
sensitive to the controversial epistemology and disciplinary
miscegenation that lay at the foundations of the testing project.
With our senses thus piqued, it is easy to miss the degree to which
the Laudan group envisioned the effort to test philosophical the-
ories as what people in the business world (so Ive been told) call a
team-building exercise. In their preface to this issue, the Laudans
refer to the fact that their eight-author Synthese paper was at the
time the most multiply authored paper ever published in philos-
ophy. Part of the reason for the lack of meaningful collaboration in
history or philosophy of science is each disciplines state of
dissensus regarding which problems are important. The Laudan
group wisely sought to encourage collaboration by encouraging
members of the respective communities to nd some common
ground with respect to where we ought to devote our research
efforts. But each disciplines culture is very much opposed to the
idea of scholars research agendas being inuenced by factors
external to our own personal curiosities. More than anything else,
this ideal contributes to our increasing irrelevance and to the ma-
terial threat to our livelihood that many of us now face at our in-
stitutions. Just as the Laudan group worried in the late 80s, we of
the current generation would do well to ask ourselves whether our
cutting-edge research is contributing to the health or the decline of
HPS.
In the spirit of the intellectual, social, and disciplinary goals for
which it was intended, Im going to use the remainder of this
introduction to try to reinvigorate this approach to the study of
science. I rst want to canvass a few different ways of thinking
about the normative signicance of the history of science d i.e., the
direct relevance of the history of science for supporting prescriptive
claims about how we ought to reason. I then turn to the issue of
deriving empirical consequences from philosophical theories. Here
I argue that this is standard practice in philosophy, and that we
ought to think of the history of science as a species of the same
genus of empirical facts that are a routine part of the philosophical
examination of normative problems.
2. Testing normative theories
To suppose that empirical facts can conict with or endorse a
standard of validity (however defensible in its own terms) is to
commit that logical error known as the Naturalistic Fallacy; and
it is on this that the historical school appear to have erected
their strange philosophy (Howson, 1990: 179).
In my view, the confrontation model of HPS is misleading and
should be abandoned even as a mode of presenting the results of
metascientic analysis. Understanding science results from a
hermeneutic procedure, in which preliminary concepts and
frameworks and initial case judgments are modied and
adjusted until a cogent account is obtained, and this procedure
should be reected in our writing about science (Schickore,
2011: 477).
I say, that sense, which is more apt to be deluded than reason,
cannot be the ground of reason, no more than art can be the
ground of nature: . For how can a fool order his understanding
by art, if nature has made it defective? or, how can a wise man
trust his senses, if either the objects be not truly presented ac-
cording to their natural gure and shape, or if the senses be
defective, either through age, sickness, or other accidents . And
hence I conclude, that experimental and mechanic philosophy
cannot be above the speculative part, by reason most experi-
ments have their rise from the speculative, so that the artist or
mechanic is but a servant to the student (Cavendish, 1666;
quoted in Anstsey 2014).
Those Fellows of Gresham who are most believed, and are as
masters of the rest, dispute with me about physics. They display
new machines, to show their vacuum and triing wonders, in
the way that they behave who deal in exotic animals, which are
not to be seen without payment. All of them are my enemies
(Hobbes Dialogus Physicus; quoted in Shapin & Schaffer, 1985:
12).
2.1. The normative signicance of the history of science
The strange idea that the history of science is a critical
resource for thinking about how we ought to make inferences is not
something for which the Laudan group can or did claim credit; it is
an explicit theme in histories of science going back several hundred
years. In her survey of histories of the sciences written between the
early 18th and early 20th centuries, Rachel Laudan (1993) shows
that normative conclusions were at consistently at the forefront.
The specic aim of these histories was to motivate the case for the
cognitive authority of science, a position which took an enormous
amount of scholarly effort and time to fortify. In an effort to achieve
this aim, authors focused predominately on the history of progress
exhibited by the various branches of science and mathematics. A
consistent track record of solving difcult problems was, it could be
shown, common to each species of inquiry, and testied to their
general ability to produce reliable knowledge. Lagranges
 C. Haufe / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 59 (2016) 68e73
estimation of the Jesuit Montuclas History of the Mathematical
Sciences is characteristic of the manner in which these works were
received, and the intent for which they were written: showing
them the path that their predecessors have followed and at the
same time kindles their zeal by the recital of the obstacles they have
vanquished and the successes they have followed (quoted in
Laudan, 1993: 6).
Why was the inference from an unmatched track record of
success to a justly deserved position of cognitive authority regarded
as legitimate? In general, a defense of the cognitive authority of any
approach to the production of knowledge d be that approach
scientic or otherwise d must ultimately rest on whatever evi-
dence can be marshaled in support of the claim that the approach
in question can be expected to deliver reliable knowledge in the
future. Because the track record of scientic inquiry was widely
understood to tell us something important about future scientic
inquiry, the decision to invest the sciences with cognitive authority
was regarded as morally responsible: we ought to entrust science
with our cognitive future, because it has taken such good care of us
in the past, and its ability to provide that care has increased over
time. The argument may not be deductively sound, but nor is it
altogether strange.
It is important here to appreciate the consequences for sciences
cognitive authority that follow from denying that the history of
science is directly relevant to normative epistemology. Justifying
the cognitive authority of science requires that we illustrate its use
of epistemic principles that we ought to follow. All parties to the
debate agree on this basic premise. Now, if the history of science is
irrelevant to how we ought to reason, then sciences track record of
success is similarly irrelevant to how we ought to reason. In this
way, the track record of science becomes irrelevant to whether we
ought to invest it with cognitive authority. If that is so, then pretty
much every existing argument for the cognitive authority of science
is fallacious. (Mutatis mutandis for specic methods of scientic
investigation, inference, and intervention).
The use of sciences history to argue for its cognitive authority is
an application of the meta-epistemological view known as episte-
mological naturalism. Epistemological naturalism treats the theory
of knowledge as an empirical theory about the ability of certain
means to promote certain epistemic ends. When these epistemic
ends are construed as ends we ought to pursue, epistemological
naturalism assumes a normative character d aptly dubbed by
Laudan normative naturalism (Laudan, 1987). (Not all epistemo-
logical naturalisms claim normative ambitions; Quine, (1969)
naturalized epistemology, for example, seems not to have.) Evi-
dence that a particular means is effective for achieving some
normative epistemic end has prescriptive import: ceteris paribus, if I
ought to pursue end E, and means M appears to be the most
effective way of pursuing E, then I ought to employ M. Under
normative naturalism, if we accept that the growth of knowledge is
something we ought to pursue, our prescribed task then becomes
to discover which set of means is best suited for doing so.
This is where the promissory notes of the sixties and seventies
mentioned by the Laudan group become relevant. The rst such
note was issued by Thomas Kuhn, at the end of his introduction to
The Structure of Scientic Revolutions. There he acknowledged the
perceived tension between his epistemologically normative ends
and the descriptive means with which he would endeavor to ach-
ieve them; History, we too often say, is a purely descriptive
discipline. The theses suggested above are, however, often inter-
pretive and sometimes normative. But the same paragraph ends
abruptly with a rhetorical question designed to suggest that the real
perversion would be not using our understanding of science to
draw normative conclusions d How could history of science fail to
be a source of phenomena to which theories about knowledge may
71
legitimately be asked to apply?4 An earlier generation of episte-
mologists, like the historians surveyed by Rachel Laudan (1993),
and the early 20th -century pragmatists, would have simply
nodded in approval (How indeed?); the rhetorical force of Kuhns
question was made possible by the long shadow that logical posi-
tivism had cast over then-recent epistemology.
Epistemological naturalism is the dominant epistemology
within philosophy of science today, and it certainly played a role in
the Laudan groups own effort to develop the empirical testing
approach (Laudan, 1984; cited in Donovan et al., 1992: x). But even
for those who reject epistemological naturalism (or just its
normative version), the normative signicance of the history of
science remains part of the well-reasoned foundation of existing
attempts to defend the cognitive authority of science and the ra-
tionality of scientic inference procedures. It is perhaps correct that
none of these defenses succeeds, as Howson says, in its own
terms. But it does not immediately follow from that that such
defenses are inadequate. We might just as easily conclude that
being defensible in its own terms (however defensible in its own
terms) is apparently not a terribly important thing for a standard of
validity to be able to do.
2.2. Deriving empirical consequences from philosophical theories
I now want to turn to the general question of what it would
mean to derive empirical consequences from philosophical the-
ories, including normative theories. By taking a slightly more
catholic (but defensibly orthodox) perspective on what counts as an
empirical consequence, I will argue that the mainstream Anglo-
American philosophical methodology that stresses thought exper-
iments, intuition, and the like is a paradigm case of a way of
approaching philosophical inquiry that attempts to empirically
conrm philosophical theories. Conceived of in this way, using the
history of science to test philosophical theories of knowledge does
not look so radical. It looks like a much-needed extension of our
favored methodology to make use of a much more relevant kind of
evidence.
I begin this section by presenting a familiar thought experiment,
for which I then attempt to provide an abstract characterization in
order to better examine its logic. This allows for a close comparison
with the logic of scientic experiment. The notion that scientic
experiments and thought experiments are two species of the same
genus is not a new idea,5 and I do not claim to have any further
insight into the relationship between the two than has already been
mentioned in the existing literature. What I hope to do is highlight
a few things that the logic of scientic experiment tells us about the
nature of philosophical theories if we treat the results of thought
experiments as relevant evidence. In particular, one thing we end
up learning is that philosophy and the sciences differ not so much
with respect to the character of their theories but rather with
respect to the quality of their evidence.
2.3. Gettier-ology
The well-known Gettier cases are sterling examples of a
thought experiment being used to support or refute a philosophical
theory d a theory of knowledge, in this specic case. What makes
the Gettier experiments so perfect for analysis is their clarity, the
clarity of the theory they were designed to test, and the impressive
4
Kuhn, 1962: 8e9. cf. Kitchers more general version 30 years on: How could our
psychological and biological capacities and limitations fail to be relevant to the
study of human knowledge? (Kitcher, 1992: 58).
5
Sorensen 1992, for example, discusses their afnities at length.
72 C. Haufe / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 59 (2016) 68e73
univocality of the results.6 The theory in question is the justied true
belief (JTB) theory of knowledge. Here is a familiar set-up:
Youre traveling through the country, in an area that (unbe-
knownst to you) contains a lot of fake barns d wooden facades
that look just like real barns from the road. As you pass the only
real barn in the area, you look at it and adopt the belief that it is a
barn.
Is this belief justied? It is, if any of our other barn inferences have
ever been justied. Is it true? Yes, because its object is an actual
barn, not a facade. But the standard reaction (my reaction) to this
description is to say that you do not know the actual barn is a barn;
you have a justied true belief that is not knowledge. So knowledge
cannot be justied true belief.
How do Gettier cases successfully refute the JTB theory? One
natural way to look at the exercise, the one that brings it in closest
connection with scientic experiments, is to think of the JTB theory
as making a false prediction. Here we interpret the JTB theory as
predicting that native English speakers (or a tutored subset) d
people who possess the linguistic competence necessary to use the
word knowledge correctly d will assent to knowledge ascrip-
tions if they are confronted with a description of a scenario in
which the JTB conditions are satised. The Gettier cases show that
this prediction is false: the JTB conditions are satised, but we feel
compelled to withhold our assent. To summarize:
Theory: knowledge is justied true belief
Prediction: competent English speakers will assent to knowl-
edge ascriptions whenever an agent is described as having a
justied true belief
Result: competent English speakers do not assent to knowledge
ascriptions to agents in Gettier cases, even though they
acknowledge that those agents have justied true beliefs.
Inference: knowledge is not justied true belief.
Lets now zoom in on the prediction and the theory it is
designed to test. It seems odd to think that the theory that
knowledge is justied true belief should make any prediction about
what respondents will do when presented with scenarios in which
someone is described as having what appears to the respondent to
be a justied true belief; what does one have to do with the other?
One response to this oddity would be to conclude that it reveals as
mistaken the view according to which the probative value of Get-
tier cases is to test a prediction made by the JTB theory. It is odd to
think that the JTB theory makes this prediction. So lets conclude
that the JTB theory probably doesnt make this prediction after all.
The problem then is to provide an alternative account of the
Gettier cases probative value. We can start by looking for some
common ground. All parties to the dispute agree that the basic JTB
theory implies that agents in Gettier cases have knowledge. There is
also widespread agreement on the fact that Gettier cases refute the
JTB theory. This agreement derives from our shared reaction to the
scenarios described by Gettier cases. Now, if we reject the idea that
our reactions to descriptions of JTB scenarios test the JTB theory,
then we are left without any account of the relevance of those re-
actions. But if we cant account for the relevance of our reactions,
then the basis upon which we formed our agreement with respect
to the Gettier cases ability to refute JTB dissolves: why think that
our reactions tell us anything about the JTB theory if we have no
idea why they would tell us anything about the JTB theory?
6
Turri, 2013 surveys recent challenges to the generality of Gettier reactions.
Compare this situation to one where we do have a good grasp on
how our reactions to certain utterances relate to the theory were
using them to test d e.g. the relationship between a theory of
grammar for a particular language and what it implies about native
speakers of that language under certain conditions. The theory that
English has an subject-verb-object (SVO) structure predicts that
native speakers will reject as ungrammatical utterances that violate
that ordering, because that theory of grammar is a theory about the
design of a specic mechanism whose task is to sort grammatical
from ungrammatical utterances. One thing that mechanism should
be expected to do is cause the native speaker to order his utterances
according to the SVO structure. We can test for this. Another thing
the mechanism should be expected to do is alert the native speaker
to violations of the SVO ordering. Again, we can (and do) test for
this. We consider native speakers reactions as probative tests of the
theory in this context because those reactions are causally relevant
to the theorys truth conditions d if we do possess such and such a
mechanism, we would expect native speakers to react in certain
ways to certain kinds of utterances.
The probative asymmetry between the JTB test and the gram-
maticality test is generated by the fact that our theory of grammar
posits a mechanism that makes our reactions causally relevant. Is it
any part of a theory of knowledge that native English speakers
possess a mechanism for sorting correct and incorrect uses of the
term knowledge? Possibly, but only insofar as a theory of what
knowledge is is in part a theory of what the word knowledge
means, and only insofar as a theory of what the word knowledge
means posits a mechanism possessed by native speakers for sorting
correct and incorrect uses of the word knowledge. But a theory of
knowledge d or of anything else d must be more than that. We
know that knowledge plays an important causal role in the world,
one that goes well beyond its association with the word knowl-
edge. If knowledge is as important as most of us think it is, it
cannot be due simply to the fact that we refer to it in a certain way.
Whatever insight into the nature of knowledge may have been
afforded us through the use of pure thought, we stand to learn just
as much by tracking knowledge via some of the other dimensions of
its causal footprint.
In this way, the decision to classify Gettier cases as tests of a
prediction made by the JTB theory invites us to think about other
sorts of predictions the JTB theory (or any other philosophical
theory) might make. Taking a cue from Gettier cases, we can ask
things like the following: supposing hypothetically that knowledge
is justied true belief, what would we expect to happen if someone
actually had a justied true belief that the barn he spotted in Fake
Barn country is a barn? One thing we might expect is for him to
successfully interact with it as if it were a real barn d bailing the
hay, petting the animals, etc. That seems like the kind of thing that
should happen when someone knows that something is a barn. So if
the JTB theory is correct, thats the kind of thing that should happen
when someone has a justied true belief about somethings being a
barn. We can test that. I can take you out to the country right now,
provide you with relevant and convincing evidence that the big red
barn-like structure in front of us is a barn, and see what happens
next. If my JTB theory of knowledge is correct, there are about to be
some pretty contented farm animals in there .
Testing for knowledge by testing for successful interaction or
intervention is a familiar strategy in the natural sciences. There are
very few kinds of evidence that are as convincing as being able to
use a theory to do things in the world that would seem impossible
to achieve without the theorys guidance. Similar considerations
apply at a higher level with respect to scientic progress. Whatever
progress is, it is caused by knowledge (whatever that is). Any theory
of knowledge should be able to explain for a given instance of
scientic progress what made that progress possible. The JTB
 C. Haufe / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 59 (2016) 68e73
theory, for example, implies that instances of progress are made
possible by justied true beliefs. That is something we can test: if
the JTB theory were true, one thing we would expect to see in the
history of science is that instances of scientic progress were
caused by justied true beliefs. Whether justied true beliefs have
caused progress is d at least, in large part d an empirical question,
and so whether knowledge is justied true belief is to that degree
also an empirical question. This view is not fundamentally different
from the perspective which invites us to evaluate the JTB theory
through the use of Gettier cases. We cant know in advance whether
every scenario in which someone is accurately described as having
a justied true belief will accommodate our intuitions about
knowledge ascriptions. To the extent that those intuitions are of any
probative value for appraising a theory of knowledge, we will have
to study them across a wide range of subjects for a wide range of
hypothetical scenarios. This idea has recently been recognized,
defended, and pursued by a growing community of philosophers
who have reappropriated the 17th-century term Experimental
Philosophy to describe their approach. Experimental Philosophy
has been highly controversial for a variety of independent reasons
which deserve serious attention. But there should be no disagree-
ment regarding the fact that we cannot invest thought experiments
with probative value unless the results are robust d i.e., unless they
are reproducible in larger samples under appropriately varied
conditions.
The general point is that philosophical claims about what
knowledge is can and should be tested against the empirical facts
about what knowledge does; the history of science is a repository
for such facts. This repository reects the causal history of our most
impressive epistemic achievements. Not every event in the history
of science is an epistemic triumph. But the epistemic achievements
with which we are most impressed have been carried out under the
auspices of science. If we grant the inescapable point that our most
impressive epistemic achievements were made possible by
knowledge, an analysis of what knowledge is must lead us to expect
to nd certain conditions realized in this causal history d the same
sorts of conditions that are, for example, realized by stipulation in
Gettier cases. Our expectations about which conditions will be
realized in association with epistemic achievements should differ
depending on which analysis of knowledge we are using to
generate those expectations. The JTB theory directs us to expect
justied true beliefs to have played the dominant role in the causal
histories of our highest epistemic achievements. Mutatis mutandis
for other analyses. The set of realized conditions that a theory of
knowledge leads us to expect of an epistemic achievements causal
history are that theorys predictions.
I have argued that the results of thought experiments are pro-
bative only insofar as we construe them as tests of the relevant
philosophical theory. While this preserves what I would regard as
an increasingly precarious role for thought experiments in philo-
sophical methodology, it simultaneously invites us to radically
expand that methodology beyond the connes of our own thoughts
d even beyond the thoughts of undergraduate survey respondents.
For the philosophy of knowledge in general, and the philosophy of
science in particular, the obvious next step is to think seriously
about how we could derive predictions that can be tested against
the history of science.
The articles collected in this issue display a series of extraordi-
narily clever attempts to subject the theory of Structural Realism to
73
experimental test. The rst, by Dana Tulodziecki, examines the
fortunes of a 19th century theory of disease to see whether and in
what way Structural Realism might account for its success. Timothy
Lyons looks at the causal history of a range of famously successful
predictions from Kepler to Einstein. The next two articles, by Kerry
McKenzie and David Glick, treat Structural Realism as a meta-
physical theory that makes predictions about the ontologies of our
most successful scientic theories. McKenzie discusses what
structuralism about fundamental particles could possibly look like,
while Glick examines the question of how structuralism fares with
respect to more general features of quantum mechanics. Each of
this latter pair is a thought-provoking example of how the meth-
odological points outlined for epistemology in this introduction can
be fruitfully extended to metaphysical inquiry as well.
Acknowledgements
This conference was funded by the College of Arts and Sciences
at Case Western Reserve University and held at its Baker-Nord
Center for the Humanities. Their support is gratefully acknowl-
edged. Many thanks to Colin McLarty, Alan Rocke, Laura Hengehold,
and Renee Holland-Golphin for logistical support. With sincere
thanks, earlier versions of this introduction were read by Colin
McLarty and Larry and Rachel Laudan. Thanks to my wife, Maysan
Haydar, for solo-parenting the kids all weekend.
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