Scientific Pluralism

Stephen H. Kellert, Helen E. Longino, and C. Kenneth Waters, Editors. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Vol. 19. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

What is pluralism? Readers of this journal might believe that they have an answer to this question. Some may also recognize that the question must for the most part be rhetorical. There is no unique consensus version of the pluralist position today. A general pluralist view may be crudely defined as the recognition of multiplicity in the world and the resulting acknowledgement that no single perspective can capture this plurality; however, this is not extremely helpful and smacks of a truism. To this crude formulation one may ask any of a number of questions. Most fundamental of these is: What sort of multiplicity are we talking about? Is it fundamentally ordered or disordered, ontologically essentialist or not, epistemically accessible or not, divinely created or randomly produced, amenable to human control or beyond our capacities for intervention? Depending on how one proposes to go about answering such questions, the particular blend of pluralism being advocated usually emerges, with positions taken on these and other dimensions serving as coordinates in the heretofore-uncharted multidimensional possibility space for representing the many potentially articulable pluralist positions.