569

*Received July 2002.

†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, Columbia Uni-
versity, New York, NY 10027; e-mail: psk16@columbia.edu.

Philosophy of Science, 69 (December 2002) pp. 569–572. 0031-8248/2002/6904-0003$10.00
Copyright 2002 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

Reply to Helen Longino*

Philip Kitcher†
Columbia University

I am grateful to Helen Longino for her thoughtful and sympathetic read-
ing of my book, Science, Truth, and Democracy (Kitcher 2001a). In this
brief reply, I’ll focus on three residual areas of disagreement, one very
minor and two that are more interesting.

First, the small point: Longino assimilates the arguments for “modest
realism” in the early chapters of my 2001 book to those I offered earlier
in my 1993 book. There’s some continuity, of course, but Chapter 2 does
try to come to terms with issues that I failed to deal with adequately earlier,
and Chapter 3 provides a more systematic approach to questions about
underdetermination than I gave in 1993. The case for modest realism is
further developed in Kitcher 2001b, and I hope it is now more convincing
than the incomplete argument of my earlier book.

Second, an issue about my conception of well-ordered science, which
Longino describes as offering my vision of “the governance of science.” I
think Longino recognizes an important distinction between an ideal at
which the sciences aim and a procedure for working towards that ideal;
but, since other readers have often confused the two, it’s worth making
the point explicit. Well-ordered science is intended as an ideal, and, though
my 2001 book poses the problem of how we might work towards this
ideal, I believe that solving this problem (giving a substantial account of
the governance of science) requires a significant body of empirical knowl-
edge (which I lack). Thus I provide evidence to show how scientific re-
search currently seems to be organized in ways that lead it to diverge from
my ideal, and invite a collaboration between philosophy of science and



 570

the social sciences to investigate how we might make up for some of the
deficiencies.

Towards the end of her review, Longino points out, quite correctly,
that scientific research is increasingly funded by the private sector, and
she asks for the grounds under which “privatized research could be
brought under the umbrella of well-orderedness.” From my perspective
this is a somewhat peculiar question. If one is firmly committed to well-
ordered science as an ideal—and I think we should be committed to this
ideal or to something close to it—then the privatization of research looks
like a trend that we should want to resist strenuously. When research is
subjected to market pressures, the inquiries undertaken are likely to be
influenced by raw (untutored) preferences of the rich and powerful. It’s
hardly surprising that the outcome in biomedicine (for example) is an
intensification of the 10/90 gap (in which 10% of the world’s research
resources are directed towards diseases that constitute 90% of the burden),
and greater investment in attempts to reduce obesity or to halt hair loss
than in finding a vaccine for tuberculosis. I take it as a strength of the
ideal of well-ordered science that it treats the pitching of scientific research
into the marketplace as a disaster.

My third disagreement with Longino is, I think, the most significant.
She recognizes that a principal difference between my 1993 and my 2001
books lies in the adoption of pluralism, but she is concerned that the form
of pluralism I espouse is too weak. She contrasts my view with a “more
radical” pluralism in which the sciences offer us “overlapping systems,
each meeting its own or a common standard of adequacy, but giving ac-
counts of common clusters that are not consistent with each other.” It
seems to me to be important to draw a distinction here. Surely it’s true
that at many stages in the history of the sciences, there have been pro-
posals for treating phenomena that answered to Longino’s description;
a well-studied example is the Bohr model of the atom, where the picture
of electrons arrayed in shells and “jumping” between them was incon-
sistent with classical electromagnetic theory. In cases like this, the in-
consistency is typically seen as a spur to further research; scientists want
to amend one, or both, of the conflicting representations (theories, mod-
els, maps, or whatever) so as to arrive at a consistent account of the area
of overlap.

The pluralism I propose consists of the following claims: (1) there are
many different systems of representation for scientific use in understand-
ing nature; (2) there is no coherent ideal of a complete account of nature;
(3) the representations that conform to nature (the true statements, the
accurate maps, the models that fit parts of the world in various respects
to various degrees) are jointly consistent; (4) at any stage in the history of
the sciences, it’s likely that the representations accepted are not all consis-



    571

1. It’s an interesting irony that Longino cites a number of recent defenders of pluralist
positions in the philosophy of biology, many of whom make similar points to those
advanced in my essays on genes (Kitcher 1982), genetic explanations (Kitcher 1984a,
1999), species (Kitcher 1984b), and the units of selection (Sterelny and Kitcher 1988);
but she consistently views me as a defender of monism. Given the view of my 1993
book, that’s quite reasonable; my essays in the philosophy of biology, however, are in
line with the pluralism I’m advancing here and in my 2001 book.

tent. My “conservatism” (in Longino’s classification of my views) consists
in my adoption of (3). As noted in the last paragraph, accepting (3) doesn’t
commit me to denying (4), which appears to me a commonplace.

In her book, Longino (2002) seems to want to illustrate the pluralism
of which she approves by examples from theoretical biology (and the phi-
losophy of biology). So far as I can tell, all the examples she offers are
thoroughly in line with the pluralism I’ve just espoused. For example, to
suggest that ant colonies are like organisms in some respects and like
collections of organisms in others isn’t to flout (3); similarly, to claim as
C. Kenneth Waters (1991) does (and as Kim Sterelny and I (1988) do1)
that selection processes can be modeled in different ways isn’t to advance
incompatible claims about the real units of selection—the idea of a “real
unit of selection” is, the pluralist suggests, something from which we
should emancipate ourselves.

I began my 2001 book with two polar images of the sciences precisely
because I think that each has something importantly right (as well as
something importantly wrong). The modest realism I defend is supposed
to strip away the metaphysical excresences that have disfigured a tradi-
tional picture of the sciences, and to allow the issues about ethical, social,
and political values to enter, not under the rubric of some confused meta-
physical or epistemological proposal, but exactly as and where they
should. Philosophers of science haven’t had a good idiom for discussing
questions about these values; and that has created muddy and muddled
discussions in which the prevalent language of philosophy of science (a
language that thrives on epistemological and metaphysical categories) has
been used to take up those questions. Longino’s hankering for a more
radical pluralism simply seems to me more of the same. So far as I can
see, there’s no basis for wanting to go beyond my modest realism and
“conservative” epistemology. The issues about values we both want to
raise can be perspicuously and precisely posed in the idiom my 2001 book
tries to offer.

Of course, I may be wrong about this, missing the need for further
reform. If so, I hope very much that Helen Longino will offer us a clear
example to demonstrate why a pluralism that adopts (3) hasn’t gone far
enough. So far as I can see, neither she nor anyone else has yet done so.



 572

REFERENCES

Kitcher, Philip (1982), “Genes”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 33: 337–359.
Kitcher, Philip (1984a), “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences”, Philosophical Review

93: 335–373.
Kitcher, Philip (1984b), “Species”, Philosophy of Science 51: 308–333.
Kitcher, Philip (1993), The Advancement of Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kitcher, Philip (1999), “The Hegemony of Molecular Biology”, Biology and Philosophy 14:

195–210.
Kitcher, Philip (2001a), Science, Truth, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kitcher, Philip (2001b), “Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy”, Philosophical Review 110:

151–197.
Longino, Helen (2002), The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sterelny, Kim, and Kitcher, Philip (1988), “The Return of the Gene”, Journal of Philosophy

85: 335–358.
Waters, C. Kenneth (1991), “Tempered Realism about the Force of Selection”, Philosophy

of Science 58: 533–573.