Mazviita Chirimuuta

But we also can't discount that the theory that arises is constrained by how things happen to be that is worked out through that process of experimental interaction.

Yeah, so that's saying that knowledge comes about through this process of interaction.

So this notion of haptic realism is emphasising...

that it's through engagement, so haptics being like the sense of touch.

The contrast here is with an ideal of knowledge, which is based on this idea that we can know things in a disengaged way.

If you think of vision as the archetype of knowledge, what happens when we look around our surroundings and use

sight as a source of knowledge we can get into this mindset where it seems like we do not have to interact with things in in order to know them we can just kind of absorb information passively and then because we're not bringing about our representations in a kind of active way it would seem to us and I'm not saying this is how vision works but it's a kind of conceit that often comes about if you use

this very visual model for knowing.

John Dewey called it the spectator theory of knowledge.

So this is a clear predecessor for what I'm saying here, is that we just look around, we absorb how things are.

Our knowledge is entirely objective.

It's almost like a God's eye view on reality.

But if you think that scientific knowledge in particular is more kind of touch-like, you can't ignore the fact that we sort of run into things, we have to pick things up, engage with them, ultimately change them in order for us to acquire knowledge of them.

So you cannot discount the fact that we're kind of meddling with things in the process of bringing about our knowledge.

and another sort of dimension of this haptic metaphor is that our hands are not only a sensory organ but they're also the means by which we manipulate things so manipulation means precisely working with the hands and so I think that really captures if you like the double face of scientific models they're both means of acquisition of knowledge in the way that hands are also sensory organs we've sort of

find things out about the world through the sense of touch.

But they're also means for changing things, for doing things.

Yeah, there's certainly like contingency in the history of science, you know, where people start out, cultural factors which prompt people to ask certain kinds of questions and not others.

So a view quite similar to what I say about haptic realism in the book is by Hasok Shang, who's a professor of philosophy of science at Cambridge.

And he has a view which he calls realism for realistic people.