Arthur Fine has presented an attractively packaged approach to understanding science and labelled it the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA). Unlike standard philosophical approaches to science, such as realism or instrumentalism, which offer an interpretation of how science fits into and is constrained by a wider picture, NOA takes science simply on its own terms. As Fine sees things, realism reviews scientific claims and wants to give them an extra, metaphysical endorsement - 'Yes, things really are like that.' It gets into trouble when it becomes unclear whether there is a coherent story to be endorsed, as is notoriously the case with quantum mechanics. Instrumentalism, on the other hand, requires that science mesh, not with metaphysical, but with epistemological demands, typically of an empiricist flavour. Fine claims that both approaches assume an aim or essence for scientific activity, an aim that provides us with a benchmark for sorting the sheep from the goats. They presume that science can only be philosophically understood by reference to some such extra. NOA, on the other hand, just takes what it finds, 'California natural' - no additives (cf. 1986b, p. 177). It is a minimalist, deflationary, non-interpretation.
Paul Abela has recently urged that we concede to Fine the essentialist characterizations of realism and instrumentalism but go on to ask what should be 'the fundamental guide for selecting the attitude we bring to science' (1996, p. 74). Abela's hope is that by distinguishing two levels of discussion we can sidestep NOA. One level is the theoretical attempt to make sense of scientific practice - and here Abela concedes force to the Ockham's razor mode of argument that urges us to dispense with unnecessary intellectual baggage, which is his reconstruction of Fine's positive case for NOA. The other level is a matter of choosing the attitude we bring to the debate, or to science itself. Abela says that essentialism at this level is a matter of wanting 'to find some interpretation beyond the historically- conditioned multifarious given' (p. 76), of proposing a more ambitious project than the 'monkish asceticism' of NOA's creed.
A first point is that NOA has no time for the activity promoted at Abela's first level of debate: making sense of scientific practice, in the philosophically loaded terms presupposed. For NOA, people get initiated into scientific practice; no doubt there are processes of 'making sense' involved here, but they are worked through in the same way we contrive to make such sense as we do make of the rest of our life. Asking questions that want realist or instrumentalist answers betrays a malady that NOA wishes us cured of - NOA is after all a Californian (or rather Illinois - Fine is at Northwestern University) rendition of late-Wittgensteinian therapy.
Abela claims Fine gives no reason for preferring minimalism at the level of attitude selection. Ockham's razor works well in other contexts - and indeed NOA will recognize it when it works locally within scientific practice itself - but Abela thinks Fine would need an extra reason for recommending it here.
Choosing attitudes is not something philosophers (including Abela in his note) have paid much attention to. Some might wish to invoke metaphysical truths as reasonable constraints on appropriate attitudes, although such a defence is not available for NOA. But if it were, it might well encourage care, if not positive asceticism, in one's attitudinal commitments. Ambitious, demanding attitudes may be desirable when one expects they will make a difference, as between teachers and pupils, but Abela concedes that science will go on in the same way, regardless of the attitudes (NOA or essentialist) we may adopt.
This inconsequence suggests that, from the perspective of NOA, Abela's second level is as misconceived as his first. NOA trusts science, so an alternative attitude might be one that distrusts it, or positively wishes to be rid of it. But these attitudes presumably would make a difference to practice, at least if enough of the community adopted them. The supposedly impotent attitudes that Abela traffics in betray the same maladies as lead to the profitless disputes about making sense of science. There is no transcendent meaning to life. Abela's essentialist attitudes wish to pretend that there is some restricted version available for the multifarious history of science. But there is no transcendent meaning to science either, and we are surely better off recognizing the fact.
I conclude then that Abela has not provided us with grounds for rejecting NOA. Our attitudes can be as corrupted by specious concerns as the rest of our intellectual life - NOA tells us to avoid all such contaminants.
But while the type of attitude Abela chooses fails to do his job, it is possible that more mileage can be got out of the contrast. I have already suggested that some pragmatically efficacious attitudes can be contrasted with NOA - someone might wish for the termination of science and a return to the practices and beliefs of some yesteryear.
More generally, and adapting points Gellner has often stressed (e.g., 1985, ch. 1), we can follow Abela in trying to locate an unargued step in Fine's position. NOA takes a widespread social practice, and endorses it. But why that practice, and not various others? My stereotype of California suggests that one could actually come upon astrologers, shamans, magicians, and various others as easily as particle physicists. And even if the stereotype is false, human history offers an astounding range of social practices, which are not straightforwardly compatible with each other in intellectual terms. Has NOA no better claim on us than parochialism? What Abela should have considered is attitude to science as contrastive (to science as against shamanism, say, or to today's science as against 1797's) rather than attitude as incorporating dubious assumptions.
NOA may well come closest to the normal thinking of a normal scientist - it is virtually defined to be that, so it ought to. And that normal thinking may not be too precise about issues that worry philosophers (cf. Jones, 1989, esp. p. 175). It may follow something like Hacking's line that if you can make it do something it's real. But let's not be too definitive about the nature of that reality: one day a miniature solar system, another day a fog swirling around a point, today something else. It may follow something like Cartwright's line that if you can get the right numbers out then the mathematics must be OK, and destined to survive the next few changes. But in following these not necessarily compatible lines it will twist and turn to accommodate each day's ups and downs. It won't look too comfortable dressed up with realist frills, nor will it be overconcerned with meeting instrumentalist demands or heeding its passport controls - as Fine says, NOA presumes the 'equal status of everyday truths with scientific ones' (1986a, p. 133).
Within science, then, NOA may well seem to have advantages. But there is a wider question that it simply cannot answer: why science? And this is surely one place where realism and instrumentalism can get their motivation. The essentialism Fine claims they share surely reflects this fact about such practices as science, astrology, or fundamentalist revealed religion as against practices like baseball and cricket: that the former are seen as dependent, to some extent, upon and thus answerable to external and uncontrollable factors and so have monopolistic tendencies within their domain of application built in, whereas with the latter there is no inherent tendency against proliferation, because everything that matters is internal to the practice. Realism and correspondence theories of truth no doubt push the explication of the former tendencies further than most participants would naturally go; empiricist epistemology is not absorbed with most mothers' milk; but these philosophical constructions are attempts to address a genuine issue, for humans, if not for trusting Californian scholars. To echo Gellner again ('the Humean predicament is not the human predicament' 1985, p. 18), the attitudes or Weltanschauung characteristic of natural science are far from natural for members of the human species, or typical of most of its history. Whether or not the predominant isms in philosophy of science successfully characterize the striving towards objectivity that marks some, but not all of our social practices, and some of them more than others, it is prima facie there to be found and ought not to be taken for granted by too unreflective an endorsement of our contingent form of life. When Fine remarks that scepticism and relativism were the original reasons for seeking to ground the rationality of science (1986b, p. 173), he may well be right, subjectively speaking for the philosophers he opposes. The Gellnerian point is that the philosophical debate has bracketed off whole ranges of options. Fine considers no alternative to trust in the 'overall good sense of science and our overall good sense' (1986b, p. 177). When we broaden the options by allowing for seriously opposed attitudes to the achievements of science, or even to picking and choosing among its self-styled practitioners, it may be that the isms Fine rejects as powerless within the enterprise can be refurbished to answer these wider questions.
When we confront the whole range of potential belief-systems people have adopted, and seek to choose among them, a realistic construal of language as the default option, and a generic empiricist epistemology, can be seen as an attempt to underwrite the choices definitive of modern industrial society. Realism, and instrumentalism in its own style, tell us to prefer science to magic, or this science rather than that self-professed science, by supplying principles that are intended to rule out a lot of other belief systems. Such principles try to articulate the good reasons why 'conspicuous success leaves little room for anything other than a common-sense acceptance of the world of science' (Fine 1986b, p. 149). In simply taking this for granted, NOA arrives after the serious selections have been made.
Abela, Paul (1996). Is Less Always More? An Argument against the Natural Ontological Attitude. Philosophical Quarterly 46, 72-76.
Fine, Arthur (1986a). The Shaky Game. University of Chicago Press.
Fine, Arthur (1986b). Unnatural Attitudes: Realist and Instrumentalist Attachments to Science. Mind 95, 149-177.
Gellner, Ernest (1985). Relativism and the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press.
Jones, Roger (1989). Scientific Realism in Real Science. In A. Fine and J. Leplin (eds.), PSA 1988, volume 2, 167-178 (Philosophy of Science Association).