Chang’s hermeneutic operational coherence: ambiguities and prospects

In Realism for Realistic People Hasok Chang defends a novel kind of scientific realism, one that places knowledge and science in the context of daily life. I identify Chang’s position as an attempt to overcome one of the core ideas in the history of the realism debate, namely exceptionalism for science which differentiates the success of scientific activity from the success of activities in daily life. I argue that Chang’s novel epistemology of science suffers from a problematic ambiguity concerning its core element, the operational coherence of an action which Chang uses to rephrase the concepts of truth and reality and to defend scientific authority. For Chang operational coherence is a hermeneutic property of an action: it is the evaluative stance of individual epistemic agents vis-à-vis their activities and practices. Chang gives much freedom to these evaluative stances, but he is vague what constrains this freedom, so as to avoid a strong individualistic relativism. I discuss Chang’s own fail-safe conditions for operational coherence: the absence of self-deception, the requirement for a full coherence and the idea of a causal connection between an agent’s success and mind-independent reality. I argue that all of them are in conflict with Chang’s desire to overcome scientific exceptionalism. As a solution, I offer two possible constraints, internal to practices themselves, which Chang does not discuss: the community and history of a practice. However, these solutions are in tension with Chang’s pragmatist defense of truth, reality and progress as central concepts with which to defend scientific authority.