Cuneo's 6 Arguments against Realism: III

I'm a bit confused by Wright's version of the explanatory requirement, and so I think that I probably chase down "Truth and Objectivity" at some point and take a look. But Wright says, according to Cuneo, that "were moral facts to exist, at least the following must be true: Such facts would have to explain the existence of non-moral facts of a sufficiently wide array of types." This is slightly different from Harman's requirement, which (as far as I could tell) was that "such facts would have to explain some non-moral observations." For Harman the concern was that experiment and testing need to be relevant for these facts, and seemingly observation is irrelevant for ethics. Sayre-McCord had a modified version of Harman's requirement that shares the spirit of it. In a certain sense, does this mean that Wright's requirement is more restrictive than Harman's? If so, this could be cheating a bit, since on a less restrictive version of the argument epistemology might be able to get in.

Under the explanatory requirement, ethics is (seemingly) out. This is because ethical facts, if they exist, don't explain any non-moral facts, it seems. And then he quickly moves to "consider a putative epistemic fact... a fact of this sort appears..to no more explain phenomena in nature such as that which biologists and physicists study than does the putative fact "that an act is wrong."" So epistemic facts would also fail the explanatory principle, and wouldn't exist.

Now, I'm not going to hold Cuneo responsible for ignoring the possibility of a potential indispensability argument in support of epistemic realism. He brings this up in Chapter 8. I think it's a serious concern for him. The entire companion in guilt style argument seems flawed, to me, for the following reason. It also starts with two similar areas of discourse, one of which we're much more confident about it being real (for instance). Do we have a good reason to believe that this discourse is real? Yes? Does that reason exist in the other discourse? No? Then isn't this THE important disanalogy between the two areas of discourse?! Am I missing something here? So we should hardly be surprised that there is an important disanalogy that can be used to argue for the reality of one rather than the other. That important difference between ethics and epistemology is exactly the one employed in chapters 4-7, namely, the indispensability of epistemology to theorizing, and hence, to science and the project of explaining our observations. I think that this is an important concern for the defense of moral realism, and a more general concern about what we aim to get out of companion in guilt style arguments.

For now, I just want to express my genuine confusion for why this isn't brought up in Chapter 3. In Harman's chapter in "Ethics and Observation" he brings the indispensability argument for mathematics as a way to account for mathematics relationship with observation. In Quine, the indispensability argument works because mathematics is empirical knowledge since epistemic holism is the case. So evidence for any thing to which math is indispensable is indirect evidence for the truth of math. It is in this way that observation is relevant to mathematical knowledge, and fulfills the spirit of the explanatory requirement.

I wonder if the indispensability argument has been transformed in the hands of Enoch and Cuneo. Both talk more about pragmatic indispensability, as if the strength of the argument is just that we can't blame folks for doing what they have to do. As far as I can tell, that's not quite the way the argument looks in the hands of a Quine or Putnam or a Colyvan. For them, the strength of the argument comes from the fact that any part of a theory is as good as any other part, and if mathematics weren't true then observation wouldn't confirm science, but observation clearly does. Enoch is rather explicit about this, because the Q-P indispensability argument, in his view, is a particular instance of a more general valid family of indispensability arguments, where various things are indispensable to various projects. I suppose that's good as far as it goes, but we should then be rather clear about when we're invoking the particular indispensability argument and when we're talking about the more generic famliy of indispensability arguments.

It seems to me that epistemology is a good candidate for a Quine-Putnam indispensability argument. Though, I probably HAVE to be wrong because Quine himself didn't think so, because he thought that epistemology should be neutered of normativity. But our epistemic beliefs seem to be indispensable for the practice of science and the expression of our scientific theories. Could we do science, or even express our theories, without talking about what constitutes good evidence and bad evidence for a theory? How could we explain any observation at all if there aren't some features that are more relevant--that is, our understanding of what is a natural kind depends, eventually, on some sort of epistemic fact about what constitutes justification for that belief. And so why not say that the very fact that observation and science is possible is good evidence that epistemic realism is true? In other words, does the scientific realist have to accept epistemic realism?

If so, then I think that epistemology fails the explanatory requirement in the same way that math does; by being indirectly relevant for the explanation of observations.