Access to reference magnets: a bitter pill you’ve already swallowed?

[This post proposes a defense of a famous defense of naive scientific realism against a famous antirealist challenge.  So, sorry that I'll have to speed through certain classics to get to the action in a timely fashion (and I'll try to add explanatory links later). 

Also, Ted Sider may have scooped me re: this proposal in Writing the Book of the World section 3.2 (I go back and forth about how to interpret him). But, regardless of priority, I'm shouting about it on the internet now because I'd like to see more uptake.]

Hillary Putnam raised a model theoretic challenge to the commonplace realist idea that `even in the ideal limit of scientific investigation' certain aspects of our best theory of the world could be wrong. David Lewis responded by invoking "reference magnets" (i.e., intrinsically eligible concepts/joints in nature) as a response to this challenge. The idea is that some concepts are more intrinsically eligible candidates for the meaning of words than others. So, it can be correct to interpret someone as meaining plus vs Kripke's quus, or electron vs. electron-that-an-ideal-observer-starting-on-earth-could-discover, even if this involves attributing them slightly more false beliefs.

Swinging back on behalf of Putnam, Tim Button and Jared Warren press a kind of access problem for fans of reference magnets. Suppose that there really are intrinsically eligible joints in nature as Lewis argues. How could creatures like us have come to recognize where these joints are, well enough to know when there is a single reference magnetic joint for our use of some word to defer to?

I think this challenge is worth taking seriously and may point out a bitter pill* which the realist/friend of reference magnetism must swallow. But I want to suggest that this bitter pill may already be part of the larger bitter pill nearly everyone has already swallowed in taking our intuitions about how to do scientific induction at face value. That is, accepting reference magnets doesn't land us with any more of an access problem than we already face in rejecting Humean skepticism about induction.

To see what I mean, consider Nelson Goodman's picture of scientific induction. When we do scientific induction, we don't treat all concepts equally. We currently take some predicates (and relations and functions etc) to be more projectable than others, e.g., green v.s grue. And (Goodman notes) we do a kind of induction about how to do induction, letting experience and reflection change our beliefs about which predicates are projectable. So (in effect) we dogmatically presume both that certain predicates are more projectable than others, and that that certain ways of letting experience change our beliefs about which predicates are projectable are reliable. And plausibly, taking scientific induction at face value requires doing something like this.

But maybe the friend of reference magnets can say that access to these facts about what's joint carving (in the sense of being specially friendly to induction) is all they need for access to reference magnets. If the reference-magnet-fan's doctrine identifies being an intrinsically eligibile concept in the sense of reference magnetism with being an intrinsically eligible concept for the purposes of scientific induction (as, e.g. Sider does and I essentially want to**), then it seems that accepting this doctrine create any extra intuitive access worries.



*[i.e., Perhaps they must embrace a rather depressing picture of the human condition, on which `justified’ reasoning (to the extent that we have any such thing) involves going along dogmatically assuming that certain methods for detecting intrinsically eligible concepts/reference magnets are tolerably accurate (and then being lucky enough to be right about this)]

**[I think one tiny refinement answering Hawthorne's problem about Europe and the Ural Mountains discussed on pg 39 of WTBOTW is needed, but that this makes no difference to the access problem stuff above. More on this in a later post]