Arguments for philosophical realism in library and information science

Library Trends, Wntr, 2004 by Birger Hjorland

IS SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE TRUE? (ABOUT EPISTEMOLOGICAL REALISM)

(Scientific) realism is often associated with the view that science provides a true or realistic picture of the world. As opposed to a metaphysical claim, this is an epistemological thesis, a thesis about human knowledge, not about the world as such. Philosophically this is termed "epistemological realism." In the introduction to his article Boyd (2002) writes:

   According to scientific realists, for example, if you obtain a good
   contemporary chemistry textbook you will have good reason to believe
   (because the scientists whose work the book reports had good
   scientific evidence for) the (approximate) truth of the claims it
   contains about the existence and properties of atoms, molecules,
   sub-atomic particles, energy levels, reaction mechanisms, etc.
   Moreover, you have good reason to think that such phenomena have the
   properties attributed to them in the textbook independently of our
   theoretical conceptions in chemistry. Scientific realism is thus the
   common sense (or common science) conception that, subject to a
   recognition that scientific methods are fallible and that most
   scientific knowledge is approximate, we are justified in accepting
   the most secure findings of scientists "at face value." (4,5)
   [Electronic version]

A lesson of the history of science is, however, that scientific claims have at least sometimes been wrong. I find it dangerous to identify myself with a theory that encourages me to a naive or uncritical view of scientific claims. Well, I also believe that a good contemporary chemistry textbook reports a realistic picture about chemical phenomena. Chemistry is a science with a relatively high level of consensus, and I am more inclined to believe that a chemistry book reports the truth, than, say, a book in the social sciences. In all sciences and fields of scholarship, however, debates and different theories and views exist. Often such debates involve ontological views about what really exists. It is not a fruitful position to presuppose a priori that knowledge claims are true. This is not so for the scientists themselves, and this is not so for teachers, librarians, information scientists,journalists, and others who mediate or intermediate between knowledge producers and users. The healthy attitude is to regard knowledge claims as just claims, not as facts. It is also important to differentiate between degrees of substantiation of knowledge claims. Some claims, e.g., mathematical proofs and some results of physical experiments, may be extremely well founded. (6) The practical implication of this view for information science has been formulated by Spang-Hanssen (2001):

   Moreover, these terms are not seldom confused with a more or less
   obscure use of the word "information" to mean something factual or
   real as opposed to representations of such facts; what is found
   written in documents--or what is said in a lecture--are according to
   this view only disguises or at best surrogates of facts. This more
   or less vague conception seems to be the basis of the distinction
   sometimes made between "fact retrieval" and "document retrieval."

   This distinction I find philosophically unbased; we here touch upon
   the fundamental problem of the meaning of meaning and of the nature
   of signs and symbols. What is more essential to us, this distinction
   seems untortunate in actual documentation work. There will,
   admittedly, be cases in which a document or information center is
   set up with the exclusive function of providing information
   concerning physical data, or statistical figures, or exchange rates
   of currencies, or stock market prices. But even in such cases, it
   applies that neither the person who requests such information nor
   the person who delivers it should ignore the reliability of data
   and forget about the general setting in which the data is acquired.
   Information about some physical property of a material is actually
   incomplete without information about the precision of the data and
   about the conditions under which these data were obtained. Moreover,
   various investigations of a property have often led to different
   results that cannot be compared and evaluated apart from information
   about their background. An empirical fact always has a history and a
   perhaps not too certain future. This history and future can be known
   only through information from particular documents, i.e., by
   document retrieval.

   The so-called fact retrieval centers seem to me to be just
   information centers that keep their information sources--i.e., their
   documents--exclusively to themselves. (pp. 128-129)