Brit. J. Phil. Sci.

56 (2005), 559–577

Realism and the Strong Program

Tim Lewens

ABSTRACT

The four tenets of the Strong Program are compatible with a scientific realism founded
on an externalist epistemology. Such an epistemology allows that appropriate norms
of rationality may differ from time to time, and from community to community, and
thereby enables the realist to embrace strong forms of the ‘symmetry principle’. It also
suggests a fruitful collaborative research program in externalist social epistemology.
Some of what the Edinburgh School says about truth can also be accepted. But the
realist should reject the School’s argument for the claim that there is no distinction
between being rational and being locally accepted as rational, which seems to rest on a
kind of epistemological internalism.

1 Introducing the Strong Program

2 Realism and the four tenets
3 A stronger reading of symmetry
4 Conflict and cooperation
5 A note on discovery and justification
6 Relativism and realism
7 Truth
8 Points of contention: the restriction of explanatory contrasts
9 Points of contention: standards of rationality

1 Introducing the Strong Program

How much of the so-called ‘Strong Program’ in the sociology of scientific
knowledge (SSK) can the scientific realist accept? Far more than many realists
may suspect, or so I shall argue in this paper. If we take the central core of the
Strong Program to be constituted by Bloor’s ‘four tenets’, then that core
commits us only to those fairly weak forms of relativism and contextualism
that a mature realist should be happy to accept. Conversely, sociologists of
knowledge need not dismiss realism on the grounds that it is committed to a
denial of manifest empirical truths about the social organisation of science
and its effects on the content of scientific belief. This is not the first paper to
argue for this kind of position. A number of other philosophers have also
argued for various forms of rapprochement between realists and those from

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560 Tim Lewens

more constructivist schools. I have allies, I think, in Kitcher ([1993], [2001]),

Dupré ([2002]), Bird ([2000]), Hacking ([1999]), Papineau ([1988]) and Pettit
([1988]).
There are many schools within the field of science studies that seek to
explain scientists’ theories and actions using socio-anthropological resources
of one kind or another. Leading figures include Pickering, Latour, Collins,
and Barnes and Bloor. In this paper I restrict my attentions to the final pair—
representatives of the so-called ‘Edinburgh School’. Little of what I say about
Barnes and Bloor can be extended to other writers.
Barnes and Bloor’s Strong Program is best understood in contrast to what
they call the ‘weak program’. The primary contrast lies in the scope allowed
to the social explanation of belief. The weak program confines social explana-
tion to scientific beliefs that somehow ‘go off the rails’. Sociological factors
are invoked to explain irrationality, mistakes, bias, the distortion of evidence,
and so forth. A number of philosophers of science have espoused the weak
program, including Laudan ([1977]) and Newton-Smith ([1981]). The Strong
Program offers social explanations for why all scientific beliefs are held—true
ones and false ones, rational ones and irrational ones.
Barnes and Bloor describe themselves as relativists, but until we attach
this label to a reasonably well-articulated position, we cannot say whether the
realist needs to oppose their relativism. Barnes himself has argued in favour
of a ‘relativism with a realist flavour’ ([1992], p. 135). His position agrees with
that of the realist in so far as he acknowledges that ‘talk of ‘‘external reality’’
is thoroughly justified and sensible’, and he departs from some realists only
when he adds that ‘no body of knowledge does or can ‘‘correspond’’ to that
reality or offer us indefeasible truths about it’ ([1992], p. 135). I will address
the topic of truth in section seven of this paper. In a more recent paper, Bloor
too has suggested that perhaps proponents of the Strong Program and realists
should be friends ([1999], p. 102):

[T]he relativism of the Strong Program is not to be counterpoised to

realism. As I have emphasised, (non-social) nature plays a central role
in the formation of belief, though how nature is experienced cannot
provide a sufficient causal explanation of how it is subsequently described.

While many of Bloor’s claims cannot be accepted at face value by the

realist—claims like ‘knowledge for the sociologist is whatever people take
to be knowledge’ (Bloor [1991], p. 5)—there is nothing in the more recent
claim about the causation of belief for the realist to complain about. Two
individuals who are exposed to exactly the same stimuli often diverge in
their beliefs. That is obvious when we think of one individual who is drunk,
another sober, both of whom are looking at the same thing. It is also evident
that socialisation plays a role in how stimuli are processed, and which beliefs
 Realism and the Strong Program 561

are formed as a result. Think of how a scientist’s disciplinary training affects

how she interprets a data sheet, for example. Even when two scientists’ beliefs
do not diverge, common stimuli alone cannot wholly explain why they hold
the beliefs they do. Commonly held cognitive apparatus, and similarities in
their training, may also explain convergence.
My strategy in this paper will be to show, in the manner exemplified in the
last paragraph, how the realist can find room for socialisation in the causa-
tion of beliefs of all kinds, and hence how the provision of social explanation
need be no threat to his position. Realism thus makes room for the core of
the Strong Program, at least with respect to the Program’s claims about
epistemology and the explanation of belief. Those are the claims foregroun-
ded in Bloor’s primary statement of the ‘four tenets’ of the Strong Program.
That said, the Strong Program often comes packaged with two further
ingredients (and I do not mean to suggest that these further elements of the
package are unrelated to each other). One is a kind of strong nominalism—a
denial that the world has some pre-existing structure to be found by scientific
inquiry. Another is a kind of meaning scepticism inspired by Wittgenstein’s
rule-following arguments called ‘meaning finitism’. Realists probably do
come into a genuine conflict with Barnes and Bloor in these other areas.
Indeed, it seems to me that the rule-following arguments are the real engine
of relativism in much of Barnes and Bloor’s work (this is certainly the case for
Barnes [1992], for example). In this paper, I ignore these elements.1 Does that
make my project uninteresting? After all, one might think there is little to be
gained by showing only that a part of the Strong Program, when given
a certain reading, is compatible with realism. The same parts of the Strong
Program are also compatible, it seems to me, with constructive empiricism
and with many forms of anti-realism. I grant that this restriction makes my
project limited. But the conclusion of compatibility is important, for two
reasons. It shows that realists need not feel threatened by much empirical
work done in the sociology of knowledge that causally explains the content
of theories by reference to the social and political backgrounds of the theorist.
On the other side, it shows that sociologists and historians should not take
the empirical fruitfulness of the Strong Program in yielding these forms of
explanation as an argument against realism. So the first reason why this work
is important is that it demonstrates that there need be no battle waged in the
science wars between those who think of science as a good engine for
the production of knowledge, and those who think of socialisation, and the
political backgrounds of scientists, as forming part of the explanation of
our most successful scientific theories. Here we can have our cake and eat

1
For a thorough (albeit hostile) examination of these other elements of the Strong Program from
a realist perspective, see Nola ([2003]).
562 Tim Lewens

it. The second reason is that these arguments point to a collaborative pro-
gram that does not deny the causal role of socio-political factors in theory
production, but instead asks which of these combinations of factors are truth-
conducive in which circumstances.
This much is good news for relations between realists and SSK-ers. But I
will not argue that everything Barnes and Bloor say about the explanation of
belief should be accepted by the realist: the Strong Program imposes inap-
propriate constraints on appeals to worldly facts in the explanation of belief,
and it fails to show that there is no distinction between being rational and
being locally accepted as rational.

2 Realism and the four tenets

Bloor ([1991], p. 7) lays out the following four tenets that together ‘define
what will be called the Strong Programme in the sociology of knowledge’. In
each case I interrupt my quotation to say a little about how the realist should
react. Bloor says of a proper sociology of knowledge that:
1. It would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions that bring
about belief or states of knowledge. Naturally there will be other types
of causes apart from social ones which will cooperate in bringing about
belief.

Of course realists typically think beliefs (and knowledge, as a species of belief)

are caused, too. Moreover, like Bloor, they will say that among those causes
some are social, and others are not. Social factors do not always play a
proximate role in the causation of belief. In perceptual cases, for example,
I may look at a chair and believe it is present, and no other agent influences
me directly when this belief is produced. Even in these cases socialisation may
be at work in the background—either in the generation of the concepts by
which we organise our experience, or in the generation of dispositions that
determine how we weigh evidence—and this more distal role for socialisation
seems enough to ground empirical sociology of knowledge.

2. It would be impartial with respect to truth and falsity, rationality or

irrationality, success or failure. Both sides of these dichotomies will
require explanation.

Again, there seems to be nothing for the realist to disagree with here. Bloor
has not said that there is no difference between truth and falsity, rationality
and irrationality. Rather, he has said only that all beliefs will require causal
explanations whatever their status. The realist certainly does not say that only
false beliefs, or only irrational beliefs, are caused.
3. It would be symmetrical in its style of explanation. The same types of
cause would explain, say, true and false beliefs.
 Realism and the Strong Program 563

This principle—the so-called ‘symmetry principle’—is the focus of most

debate around the Strong Program. I will have a lot to say about it presently,
but for the moment let me put its interpretation and assessment on hold.
4. It would be reflexive. In principle its patterns of explanation would have
to be applicable to sociology itself. Like the requirement of symmetry, this
is a response to the need to seek for general explanations. It is an obvious
requirement of principle, otherwise sociology would be a standing refuta-
tion of its own theories.

Once again, the realist has nothing to object to. If beliefs are caused, and
if beliefs of all types require causal explanations, then beliefs of sociologists
require these kinds of explanations too. Otherwise there would be beliefs that
violated the Strong Program’s own principles. This fourth tenet is a consist-
ency requirement on the Strong Program.
We now need to return to the unexamined third tenet, the symmetry prin-
ciple. As it stands, it is too ambiguous for discussion, but here is one way
Bloor tries to clarify it:
If these theories are to satisfy the requirement of maximum generality they
will have to apply to both true and false beliefs, and as far as possible the
same type of explanation will have to apply in both cases. The aim of
physiology is to explain the organism in health and disease; the aim of
mechanics is to understand machines which work and machines which
fail; bridges which stand as well as those which fall. Similarly the soci-
ologist seeks theories which explain the beliefs which are in fact found,
regardless of how the investigator evaluates them. (Bloor [1991], p.5)

Of course in one way this looks like a terrible analogy, for it seems to show
the opposite of what Bloor might desire (Brown [1989], p. 30). Engineers do
not give just the same explanations for why bridges stay up as for why they
fall down, and machines that work may need different explanations from
machines that fail. So it doesn’t follow that the same explanations need be
given for true beliefs as for false ones, even when we follow this analogy. But
Bloor is using the analogy to make the point that the same family of explan-
atory concepts should work to explain all kinds of belief formation. Roughly
the same kinds of concepts—concepts of force, for example—explain why
bridges stand up and why they fail, but characteristic patterns of force may
explain failure. The analogy with mechanics and physiology does not by itself
tell us that the same kinds of social explanation are involved in cases where
science gets it right compared with those where it doesn’t, even if it does
suggest that we might always seek social categories of one sort or another
to explain all kinds of belief.
Does this show that the symmetry principle is untenable? It seems not,
because in other places where Barnes and Bloor try to clarify it, they suggest
that they intend it to be read in only a weak sense. The analogy with
564 Tim Lewens

physiology is appropriate after all, for SSK’s symmetry is similar to physio-

logy’s symmetry. We are asked merely to provide explanations from the same
general domain for both rational and irrational beliefs. This requirement does
not tell us that within that domain there might not be characteristic differ-
ences between the causes of rational and irrational belief. So, for example,
Barnes and Bloor say:
Our equivalence postulate [an alternative name for the symmetry
principle] is that all beliefs are on a par with one another with respect
to the causes of their credibility. It is not that all beliefs are equally true
or equally false, but that regardless of truth and falsity the fact of their
credibility is to be seen as equally problematic. The position we shall
defend is that the incidence of all beliefs without exception calls for
empirical investigation and must be accounted for by finding the specific,
local causes of credibility. [Sociologists of knowledge] simply investigate
the contingent determinants of belief and reasoning without regard to
whether the beliefs are true or the inferences rational. They exhibit the
same degree of curiosity in both cases. (Barnes and Bloor [1982], p. 23)

Bloor is still saying something similar in 1999:

[The Strong Program’s claim] is that all theories and beliefs equally face
the problem of credibility, and hence that all differences in, and degrees of,
credibility are in equal need of causal explanation. (Bloor [1999], p. 102)

So on this reading of the symmetry principle there is also nothing for the
realist to disagree with. The ‘problem of credibility’ is the problem of explain-
ing why certain beliefs, or practices of inference, are found credible by those
who hold them. Even realists agree that true beliefs can be explained causally,
and beliefs about what reasons are good reasons need causal explanation too.
Realists may not be all that curious about why most people believe that
deduction is truth-preserving, but there is certainly a question to be asked
here, and the effort on the part of sociology to make us curious about this is
not objectionable. The fact that the explanatory interests of realists and
SSK-ers may differ does not entail that they disagree on any more substantial
point of metaphysics or epistemology. My own view that modus-ponens is a
good inference certainly did not arise in me spontaneously, and there is a
causal, sociological story to be told about why I hold it.

3 A stronger reading of symmetry

One might think I have bought compatibility between realism and the Strong
Program by giving the four tenets such a weak reading as to make the Strong
Program a trivial position. But in some cases, realists can even embrace a
fairly strong form of symmetry which agrees that social determinants of true
and false, justified and unjustified beliefs are exactly the same. Such is the
 Realism and the Strong Program 565

case if one accepts some form of reliabilism, and I will be using reliabilism as
my representative epistemology for the realist from now on.2 The reliabilist
says that whether a belief is justified or warranted depends on whether it
is formed by a reliable mechanism. Reliabilists are typically externalists—
justification is a matter of reliability whether or not that reliability is itself
known or believed by the knower. The question of the reliability of a method
often relates in part to matters wholly outside an individual, or an indivi-
dual’s community. That is clearest in the case of perceptual beliefs: two
individuals may be in the same internal states, and acquire the same beliefs
(say that the room they are looking into is cubic), yet because one is looking
into a normal cubic room and another is looking into a trapezoidal Ames
room, the first may acquire true, justified beliefs and the second false, unjus-
tified ones. It is because of factors external to these perceivers that one has
reliably formed beliefs, another unreliably formed beliefs. Yet in terms of the
causal explanation of their beliefs at the neurological level what we say may
be exactly the same.
Equally, it is possible that when the causes of belief are social, the social
determinants of both true and false beliefs are identical. That is obviously the
case when we are speaking about testimony. Whether my belief that you
caught a 15ft trout is true or false, what causes that belief, at least at the
social level, could be the same—you assure me that you did. Even the social
determinants of justified and unjustified beliefs may be identical. Consider,
for example, one society in which scratching the nose is a reliable indicator
of honesty, and another society where it is a reliable indicator of deceit. On
Monday I look at Jim, who tells me, while scratching his nose, that he
once went three rounds with Mike Tyson. I believe him on the basis
of this. On Tuesday Joe tells me the same thing, he scratches his nose, too,
and I believe what he tells me also. Jim is in one society, Joe the other.
My method of belief-acquisition (‘accept what people tell you when they
are scratching their noses’) is reliable on Monday and unreliable on Tuesday,
even though the social story about why I came to my belief is the same on
both days.
This shows that, in a rather weak sense, reliabilism is a kind of contextualist
epistemology. This terminology may be misleading, for I do not mean to
invoke a Lewis-style contextualism here (Lewis [1996]). What I mean is
quite simple. The reliabilist denies that the reliability of a belief-forming
process depends only on facts about the believer. So we should not say

2
This strategy of using reliabilism to demonstrate compatibility between realism and the Strong
Program was pursued a while ago in a very useful paper by Papineau ([1988]). My own approach
fleshes out in more detail what an externalist should say about the Strong Program (extending
discussion to the Program’s relativism and its views on truth and contrastive explanation), but
there is also at least one point on which Papineau and I disagree (see note 3).
566 Tim Lewens

that a method such as seeing is reliable, for seeing will be part of a reliable
perceptual process in some circumstances (good light, an appropriate distance
from the object), and not in others. Reliability is a property of a full set of
belief-forming circumstances that include environmental facts that are not
parts of the believer, and that the believer may have no control over. So
the question of whether some type of process (say, believing what nose-
scratchers say) is a good one depends on local circumstances—for example,
circumstances relating to whether nose-scratching is, or is not, a sign of
deceit. Here, again, one might say the realist is in tune with some of what
Bloor wants to say for the Strong Program. Reliability of an inferential prac-
tice (‘always believe a nose-scratcher’), and hence the justification it bestows,
will often be community-dependent. The community-dependency of reliabil-
ity will typically be a feature of processes of testimonial belief-acquisition,
and testimony is often a concern of the sociologist. One should not stress
these similarities too much, for the community-dependence of justification
has quite different meanings for the reliabilist and for Bloor.
We can now say a little more to clarify the relationship between what
the Strong Program opposes and what reliabilism (and forms of realism
that build on it) asserts regarding justification and rationality. Bloor does
not oppose his relativism to realism, but to what he calls ‘absolutism’
([1991], p. 102). Reliabilism is also opposed to absolutism, in the sense that
it allows that types of belief-forming processes are only conditionally good—
that is, they help form beliefs reliably in some circumstances, but not in oth-
ers. But reliabilism is absolutist in the sense that it gives a single standard for
what property makes a belief-forming process yield knowledge, or (on some
versions of the theory) justification.
If a rationally held belief is the same thing as a justified belief, then the
reliabilist will be opposed to an absolutist conception of rationality in the
same way that he is opposed to an absolutist conception of justification.
Ramsey appears to adopt a view of this kind when he writes ‘we are all
convinced by inductive arguments, and our conviction is reasonable because
the world is so constituted that inductive arguments lead on the whole to true
opinions’ (quoted in Mellor [1991], p. 254). I will call this the broad view of
rationality. The reliabilist might oppose this broad view and argue instead
that rationality and justification come apart. On the narrow view, rationality
is to be understood as a matter of ‘getting one’s own house in order’. On this
view, a perfectly rational agent may have unjustified beliefs because although
there is nothing wrong with the agent’s inferential practices, the inputs to
those processes are faulty and the overall processes of belief formation are
unreliable. Having ‘good’ inferential practices here might be understood in
the spirit of reliabilism: they are such that were the inputs true, then neces-
sarily the outputs would be true also. In other words, to be a rational agent is
 Realism and the Strong Program 567

just to reason deductively. If this is the way we go, then there will be rather
little to rationality: one could fail to use induction and still be counted
rational. It is also unclear why we would want to be rational in this sense,
for if one’s inferential practices are deductively valid, yet all of one’s inputs
are false, then one’s actions will tend to fail. But it would be possible,
although maybe strained, for the reliabilist to uphold this kind of narrow
view of rationality. If she goes this way, then there is a sense in which she
is an absolutist about rationality. There is only one way to be rational, and
that is to reason deductively.

4 Conflict and cooperation

What I have said so far needs qualification. Genuine conflicts can arise
between realists and sociologists of knowledge—the strains between the
two traditions are not mere figments of the imagination. Some empirical
claims made by practitioners of the Strong Program about what causes belief
really will make any claim on the part of the realist that the belief in question
is knowledge look strained. And if sociologists tend to make these kinds of
claims very often, then the realist seems to be on flimsy ground. If a sociolo-
gist of knowledge argues that Darwin wrote his book on the origin of species
by jotting words at random that he heard from people in the pub, then the
realist who thinks that Darwin’s theory is a good one had better argue with
that story. Realists may need to pick fights with some sociologists, on some
occasions, when the causal stories told seem also to make belief-formation
unreliable. But realists should not have any a priori objection to the Strong
Program, for the Strong Program itself does not have as a tenet that most
belief-forming processes are bad. Indeed, one of its central themes is its
resistance to making any such evaluative pronouncements.
This all points to an interesting research program that would lie at the
interface of SSK and realist epistemology; namely, the investigation of
what kinds of social processes of belief-formation are reliable, and under
what circumstances (Bird [2000], p. 275 says the same thing). We can get a
flavour of this by considering what the realist might say about a critique of
the theory of evolution by natural selection that takes its inspiration from
some comments by Marx (Radick [2003] says a lot more on this question).
Marx famously writes, in a letter to Engels (18 June 1862, quoted in
Schmidt [1971], p. 46):

It is remarkable how Darwin recognises among beasts and plants his

English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of
new markets, ‘inventions’, and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is
Hobbes’ ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’.
568 Tim Lewens

Similar thoughts are to be found in a letter from Engels to Lavrov

(12–17 November 1875, also quoted in Schmidt [1971], p. 47):
The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a
tranference from society to living nature of Hobbes’ doctrine of ‘bellum
omnium contra omnes’ and of the bourgeois economic doctrine of com-
petition together with Malthus’ theory of population. When this conjur-
or’s trick has been performed, [. . .] the same theories are transferred back
again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their
validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.

The realist does not need to oppose the message implicit in these letters that
the content of Darwin’s theory reflects the social organisation in which it is
produced. So the realist also does not need to oppose some fairly strong
claims which sociologists of knowledge might make about the causal impact
of Victorian society on the form of evolutionary theory. What follows is a
sketch of how the realist might go about assimilating the sociological claim.
The realist might begin with the importance of population-thinking to
evolutionary biology. Essential to the explanation of adaptation by natural
selection is the focus on populations, rather than archetypes, and on fluctu-
ations of frequency in such populations. The apparatus of economics, and
Malthusian thinking, are essential to the articulation of such theory, and the
development of such theory is unlikely outside the industrialised milieu. Of
course I am not claiming that this is the right response from the realist, only
that it gives a kind of ‘how-possibly’ explanation for a way in which the
content of science could be strongly influenced by social and political
background without violating the realist’s commitment to the general reliab-
ility of scientific inquiry.

5 A note on discovery and justification

The realist might try to demonstrate compatibility between Barnes and
Bloor’s work and realism by leaning on the distinction between the context
of discovery and the context of justification. The argument would go like this.
Realists are interested in showing that scientific claims are properly supported
by evidence. That is a question of justification. Sociologists, in giving causal
stories about the generation of belief, tell us something about discovery—
they tell us something about how a scientist, or group of scientists, may gen-
erate a belief, or conjecture, for the first time. Since the question of why
someone formulates a hypothesis has nothing to do with the question of
whether the hypothesis is justified, there is nothing the sociologist can say
that will threaten the realist’s position.
Barnes and Bloor ([1982]) consider this argument and reject it on
grounds of scepticism about the propriety of the discovery/justification
 Realism and the Strong Program 569

distinction itself. This is not the place to discuss that distinction in detail, but
it is the place to point out that reliabilism will also lead us to a kind of
scepticism about it. For the reliabilist, beliefs are justified in virtue of the
processes that produce them. So processes that lead to the initial formulation
of some belief can be the very same processes that justify that belief. That is
clearly the case for many novel, perceptually formed beliefs. The moral to
draw from this short section is that one need not cling to the discovery/
justification distinction in order to argue that various sociological causal
stories about the generation of belief make room for the justification of the
belief in question.

6 Relativism and realism

Have I grossly distorted the Strong Program to make it congenial to realism?
I don’t think so. Several passages from Barnes and Bloor’s work are
thoroughly in tune with a mature scientific realism. Consider the following
snippets, all of which lay out a picture of science as a collective endeavour,
in which socially organised individuals form beliefs on the basis of interac-
tions with a causally efficacious, mind-independent, nature:
The working assumption . . . is that scientists are always responding to
nature, but doing so collectively through their shared conventions and
institutionalised concepts. (Bloor [1999], p. 90)

The stimulation caused by material objects when the eye is turned in a

given direction is indeed a causal factor in knowledge and its role is to be
understood by seeing how this cause interacts with other causes. (Barnes
and Bloor [1982], p. 33)

If we believe, as most of us do believe, that Millikan got it basically right, it

will follow that we also believe that electrons, as part of the world Millikan
described, did play a causal role in making him believe in, and talk about
electrons. (Bloor [1999], p. 93)

The realist will also accept this explanation for why sociology has a role:
It is because the effect of ‘the facts’ is so different that the sociology of
knowledge has a task. (Barnes and Bloor [1982], p. 34)

Realists may not like the scare quotes around ‘the facts’, but there is nothing
else to complain about in this underdetermination argument. When looking
at the same thing, different people can acquire different beliefs. So something
other than the facts is needed to explain divergence in these cases. Two indi-
viduals may be in different psychological states, and those psychological
states may themselves be the result of different forms of socialisation. We
saw that at the beginning of the paper with the example of two scientists
whose different training (perhaps in different techniques of statistical analysis)
explains their divergent beliefs when they look at the same data sheet.
570 Tim Lewens

Barnes and Bloor describe their position as relativistic, but many of their
explanations of this relativism make it look mild indeed:
The simple starting-point of relativist doctrines is (i) the observation that
beliefs on a certain topic vary, and (ii) the conviction that which of these
beliefs is found in a given context depends on, or is relative to, the cir-
cumstances of the users. But there is always a third feature of relativism.
It requires what might be called a ‘symmetry’ or ‘equivalence’ postulate.
([1982], p. 22)

Realists agree that beliefs vary, and they also agree that background circum-
stances like training affect which beliefs are found where. Only the third
feature of relativism could make the two positions incompatible. But that
third feature is just the symmetry principle, which we have already seen to
be compatible with realism. They explain it using these words, which I quoted
near the beginning of this paper:
Our equivalence postulate is that all beliefs are on a par with one another
with respect to the causes of their credibility. It is not that all beliefs are
equally true or equally false, but that regardless of truth and falsity the fact
of their credibility is to be seen as equally problematic. ([1982], p. 23)

7 Truth
In this section I want to show that a lot of what Bloor has to say about truth
is compatible with realism. Consider the following:
[O]n a naturalistic approach, ‘correspondence’ has to be seen as a relation
which actors themselves assert or impute or accept, rather than something
operating as a real cause [. . .]. More specifically, ‘corresponding’, or not
‘corresponding’ to reality, are not causal relationships that bodies of
beliefs bear to their referent. (Bloor [1999], p. 89)

First, some preliminaries: the realist need not adopt a correspondence theory
of truth at all. She might be a minimalist, for even minimalism allows the
formulation of an epistemic realism that says our theories make claims about
a mind-independent world, and that our methods of belief-formation in sci-
ence reveal the nature of this world reliably. So an attack on the correspond-
ence theory will not suffice to bury realism. Moreover, there are two kinds of
explanatory role that one might want to assert for truth: first, that corres-
pondence explains why one believes what one does; second, that actions
caused by true beliefs are likely to be successful. The explanatory link that
the realist may want to assert between truth and success is not undermined by
what Bloor says here about the first kind of link.
Let us suppose that the realist in question does accept a correspondence
theory of truth. Correspondence theorists themselves don’t think that
correspondence is a causal relationship any more than Bloor does. Any
 Realism and the Strong Program 571

correspondence theorist who thinks beliefs about the future can be true does
not think this (unless he thinks that reverse causation acts in these cases).
Correspondence cannot causally explain why I believe it will rain tomorrow,
even if my belief is true in virtue of its correspondence with the facts.3 Some-
times facts cause belief in them, but sometimes facts cause false beliefs, too.
One can be caused to believe that it is raining by the fact that it is raining, but
this same fact can cause others to believe falsehoods, as when the loud noise
the rain makes on a metal roof makes someone believe that it is hailing. And,
of course, one does not give much of an explanation for the accuracy of a
belief by pointing to the fact that the belief represents. It is more informative
to look to the processes involved in the causal chain between world and belief.
It is because of a complex set of processes that, when I look out the window at
the rain, I am caused to believe it is raining. Correspondence between belief
and world here is the upshot of a complex chain of events, and these causal
chains may also often involve socialisation. Hence the realist also looks likely
to endorse this further claim from Bloor, but he should resist the hint that we
should abandon talk of correspondence altogether:
Talking about a theory ‘corresponding’ to reality is simply a vocabulary
for expressing the upshot of these varied and complicated processes. It
conveniently encodes their outcome, but it doesn’t reveal or refer to what
they really consist in [. . .]. The danger comes when such talk, of ‘true’ and
‘false’, etc., is taken out of its workaday context and treated as a given in
reflective, analytical or philosophical enquiries into the working of science.
Then it causes trouble by encouraging simple and misleading pictures,
pictures that purport to refer to the causes of judgements that we make,
when really they are the effects of those judgements. ([1999], p. 90)

8 Points of contention: the restriction of explanatory contrasts

Although we have seen that much of what the Strong Program proposes is
in harmony with scientific realism, there remain some points where Bloor’s
arguments break down. I begin this section with a quotation extending a
passage I have already used:
If we believe, as most of us do believe, that Millikan got it basically right, it
will follow that we also believe that electrons, as part of the world Millikan
described, did play a causal role in making him believe in, and talk about
electrons. But then we have to remember that (on such a scenario)

3
If we have justified beliefs about the future, the reliabilist needs to say that these beliefs are
reliably caused, but not by the facts they represent. Mellor ([1991]) attempts a reliabilist solution
to the problem of induction that respects this condition. Papineau ([1988], p. 52) slips up when he
implies that the realist must always include the fact represented by a justified belief among the
causes of that belief: ‘the explanation of creditable beliefs needs to differ from those of beliefs in
general at least to the extent of allowing that the causes of those beliefs are the truth conditions
of those beliefs’.
572 Tim Lewens

electrons will also have played their part in making sure that Millikan’s
contemporary Felix Ehrenhaft didn’t believe in electrons. Once we realise
this, then there is a sense in which the electron itself ‘drops out’ of the
story because it is a common factor behind two different responses, and it
is the cause of the difference that interests us. ([1999], p. 93)

In fact, the world will not always drop out in this way. We are being asked to
focus here on cases in which both investigators are affected by electrons, and
it is some further set of social/cognitive practices that determine the different
responses to the input which electrons provide. In many cases (such as the
example of two scientists poring over the same data set), the facts will not
serve to explain divergence. But reflection on non-scientific cases makes it
clear that sometimes there really are important asymmetries at work that
the objects of belief do enter into.
Consider the following case. Jim and John go hiking. Jim wanders into a
cave and stumbles on Bigfoot while John is outside sleeping under a tree. Jim
comes to believe the proposition ‘Bigfoot exists’; John continues to believe the
proposition ‘Bigfoot doesn’t exist’. Here Bigfoot does enter into the causal
story of why Jim believes in Bigfoot, but Bigfoot does not play a role in the
causal story of why John doesn’t believe in Bigfoot. In this case, the contrast
between Jim’s belief and John’s belief is explained very well by pointing out
that Jim went into Bigfoot’s cave, but John didn’t. Bigfoot does not ‘drop out’
of the story. Just as this is not the case for everyday beliefs, it won’t be the
case for scientific beliefs either. In many cases, if we want to explain contrasts
in belief, it will be appropriate to look to what parts of the world the different
scientists are exposed to, and sometimes it will be appropriate to say that a
salient difference is that scientist A is affected by an object that is part of the
content of A’s belief that P, while scientist B, who believes not-P, is not affec-
ted by that object, or has a very different kind of encounter with the object.
A further point is that we must not artificially restrict our contrasts. There
are more kinds of question than ‘Why does scientist A believe P, while
scientist B believes not-P?’ In these cases, if both are in the presence of the
same worldly items, then those worldly items themselves won’t explain the
differences between them. But these are not the only legitimate questions to
ask. We could also ask ‘Why does scientist A believe P, rather than believing
Q?’ Here the nature of the non-social world may well play a role. If the
question is ‘Why does Jim believe that Bigfoot is in the cave, rather than
that his mother is in the cave?’, it is perfectly legitimate to say ‘because Big-
foot is in the cave, and Jim’s mother isn’t’.4

4
Here I am grateful to Nick Tosh for pointing me in the direction of some key passages from
Bloor, and also for allowing me to read his excellent M.Phil. dissertation, which examines
Bloor’s use of contrastive explanation in detail (Tosh ([2002]).
 Realism and the Strong Program 573

In earlier work, Barnes and Bloor anticipate this problem:

Certainly any differences in the sampling of experience, and any differ-
ential exposure to reality must be allowed for. But that is in perfect accord
with our equivalence postulate which enjoins the sociologist to investigate
whatever local causes of credibility operate in each case. (Barnes and
Bloor [1982], p. 35)

Note how strong this concession seems to be. This tells us that differential
exposure to nature counts among the local causes of credibility. Or, in the
example just used, it looks like the presence of Bigfoot is one of the causes of
credibility of the belief that Bigfoot is in the cave. This is another move in the
direction of realism: we can cite facts about the nature of the non-social world
to explain (among the causes of credibility) why two scientists diverge in their
views.
These observations can help us to see that once the existence of worldly
facts is acknowledged, the sociologist should not restrict their use unduly in
the generation of both explananda and explanans. Suppose we know on the
basis of modern biogeography that birds of a certain species did not exist
in France at a time when a French naturalist claims to have observed
them there. This puts limits on the causal explanation we might give of the
naturalist’s claim, for it rules out an appeal to a bird of the species in
question as a cause of that claim. But it also alerts us to a series of questions
that we might not otherwise have asked. Did the naturalist in fact observe
the bird somewhere else? If so, what explains his claiming to have seen it in
France? More important for this discussion is the possibility that our modern
taxonomy is different from that of the French naturalist. Perhaps the natur-
alist used a more inclusive set of criteria for species membership than we
do. In which case, we might return again to modern biogeography to see
what species were in France at the time, hence what kind of bird the naturalist
might have observed, hence how his taxonomy might have differed from ours.
This taxonomy might reflect social or economic practices of the time that
are no longer alive today. The interplay between modern science, past science
and other historical circumstances can be important in the illumination of
just the kinds of social institutions that the Strong Program is interested in.
There will be all kinds of cases where, when we wish to explain why scientists
believe what they do, the world will not drop out from the account, and
neither will our contemporary theories about it.

9 Points of contention: standards of rationality

Where the realist parts company most clearly with Barnes and Bloor is on
questions of rationality and the determinants of credibility. Here I only
present a brief overview of some issues. Barnes and Bloor say that ‘For the
574 Tim Lewens

relativist there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs
are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such.’ (Barnes
and Bloor [1982], p. 27) This is on the grounds that ‘there are no context-free
or super-cultural norms of rationality’ (p. 27).
Bloor says something similar in his more recent paper:
The point of the symmetry principle is to enjoin sociologists to draw back
from making first-order judgements. The point is to make such judgements
the objects of enquiry. It is precisely judgements of this kind which are to
be explained. Such a position is ‘relativist’ because there are no absolute
proofs to be had that one scientific theory is superior to another: there are
only locally credible reasons. ([1999], p. 102)

If the realist adopts what I called the broad view of rationality, he will
concede that norms of rationality are local. The reliabilist adopting the nar-
row view denies this, but both deny the further claim that there is no fact
of the matter about whether some norms of rationality are better than
others. We saw that the reliabilist should agree that whether a belief is justi-
fied can turn on local, contextual matters, for whether some process is reliable
can turn on local, contextual matters. Even so, there is a fact of the matter
about such things as how best to tell sheep from goats, how best to decide
whom to trust, how best to predict whether it will rain. Dependence of reli-
ability on context does not mean that there is no distinction between being
viewed as reliable and being reliable. Analogously, it is one thing to say that
the attributes of a reliable car depend on what kinds of demands the circum-
stances of use place on it, another thing to say that there is no difference
between being reliable and being viewed as reliable by local users. If the
reliabilist adopts the narrow view of rationality, she will say that it is the
fact that deduction takes the reasoner from truth to truth that makes it
rational, and being viewed as truth preserving is not the same as being
truth preserving.
This short-changes Barnes and Bloor’s argument somewhat. After all, it
is one thing for me, as an outsider to a local community, to assert that a
locally endorsed belief-forming practice may be unreliable in spite of that
endorsement. It is another thing to demonstrate to my own satisfaction
that it is unreliable, and another thing again to demonstrate this unreliability
to the satisfaction of the locals themselves. One might think an assertion of
inferiority is empty unless backed up by these kinds of persuasive reasons. If
such reasons cannot be supplied, then one might equally think that one has
no right to the assertion of inferiority. And Barnes and Bloor are sceptical of
our abilities to provide anything other than locally persuasive reasons. Some
communities, they think, might have very different inferential practices that
would render them immune to what I might regard as a good technique of
persuasion.
 Realism and the Strong Program 575

The analogy of the car should put us on our guard here. Just because I
cannot persuade Sam of my view that his car is a death-trap does not mean
that Sam’s car is just as good as mine, nor does it make my belief that Sam’s
car is a death-trap (and the subsequent behaviour that it causes) idle. For
cars, and for belief-forming mechanisms too, what matters is reliability, not
beliefs about reliability. Two individuals, with fully coherent belief sets, each
fully convinced of the safety of their own car, and each immune to the
arguments of the other, are not necessarily just as well off as each other.
How well off they are depends on whether their cars are safe or not.
Lying behind Barnes and Bloor’s epistemology is the Cartesian internalist
principle that for beliefs, and the processes that form them, to be good
demands that the possessor of those beliefs, or processes, can establish
their qualities through reasoning that could convince any coherent doubter.
This internalist principle is one that the reliabilist rightly rejects. It sets stand-
ards of justification that cannot be met, for the reliabilist agrees that we
cannot prove the reliability of most (perhaps all) mechanisms. The analogy
of the car also indicates that this principle is not required to explain why we
want warrants for our beliefs. Reliability is a quality we want in cars because
reliable cars get us safely where we want to go in the long run. Reliability is
valuable in cars regardless of whether it is a property that we can demonstrate
to a coherent doubter. Similarly, reliability is a quality we want in our belief-
forming processes because reliable processes, unlike lucky guesses, will pro-
duce true beliefs in the long run. And again, reliability is a valuable property
regardless of whether it is demonstrable to a coherent doubter.
So when Barnes and Bloor say there is no distinction between one infer-
ential practice being better than another and it being merely viewed as such,
they implicitly appeal to the principle that superiority is the kind of property
that would have to be demonstrable to a dissenter, without relying for that
demonstration on more local standards (standards that the dissenter may
consistently reject). The externalist rejects the premise that if we cannot
prove the superiority of our belief-forming practices in this way, then we
cannot justifiably claim that our belief-forming practices are superior to
those of the dissenter. We do not need to provide trans-cultural evidence
or proof for the reliability of our belief-forming processes if the scientific
enterprise is to be justified on realist grounds. Consider again the debate
over the rationality of induction. Many who think induction gives us war-
ranted beliefs will say that it does so in virtue of the way the world is ordered
(e.g. Mellor [1991]). Induction is rational if it is reliable, and it is reliable
if the world is lawlike. So induction itself is only contextually reliable, for
its reliability depends on extrinsic facts about the regularity of the world. One
cannot prove that induction is rational, at least not if that means proving it is
reliable. That would demand proving that the world is regular. Yet that can
576 Tim Lewens

be done only if one already endorses the ability of inductive methods to tell us
about laws of nature based on finite observations. There is nothing inconsist-
ent in the counter-inductivist’s view that because counter-induction has
always failed in the past, it is now time to reason using counter-induction,
and therefore time to act on the supposition that patterns of nature will not
follow the patterns they have in the past. Yet the reliabilist will say that
if the world is lawlike, the inductivist’s beliefs are justified and the
counter-inductivist’s are not. That is so in spite of the consistency of the
counter-inductivist’s position, and the consequent impossibility on the part
of the inductivist to prove the superiority of his own position to it.
Reliabilist justifications of induction themselves acknowledge the kinds of
circular, local explanations of warrant that the Strong Program thinks we
must settle for. But it is a mistake to infer from the fact that the reasons
we give for preferring one practice of inference over another are circular,
to the conclusion that there is no distinction between being rational and
being regarded as rational. This is one area where the Strong Program’s
relativism slips up. Indeed, it may be that much of the appeal of relativism
in general comes from drawing a mistaken conclusion from the acknowledged
failure of the foundationalist project in epistemology.5 The moral to draw
from that failure is not that all coherent justifications are equally good, but
that having a good justification is not always a matter of having coherent
reasons.

Acknowledgements
Versions of this paper were read at the International Philosophy of Science
conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April 2003, and at Shanxi University,
Beijing University and Qinghua University in April 2004. I am grateful to
the audiences there, and to A. Bird, J. R. Brown, A. Chakravartty, N. Jardine,
M. Kusch, P. Lipton, D. H. Mellor, R. Nola and D. Papineau for comments
and discussion of earlier drafts.

University of Cambridge,
Department of History and Philosophy of Science,
Free School Lane,
Cambridge CB2 3RH,
UK
tml1000@cam.ac.uk

5
My diagnosis here is similar to that of Bird ([2000], ch. 6).
 Realism and the Strong Program 577

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