In a recent paper, Anjan Chakravartty discusses the concept of “epistemic stances.” This idea is not new, but Chakravartty provides a good description of what such a stance would be:

An epistemic stance is an orientation, a collection of attitudes, values, aims, and other commitments relevant to thinking about scientific ontology, including policies or guidelines for the production of putatively factual beliefs . . .

A stance is not a claim about the world. Stances are not believed so much as adopted and exemplified in assessments of evidence, producing interpretations of scientific work that yield claims about scientific ontology, and claims regarding matters about which it would be better to be agnostic instead.
— Chakravartty, 1308-9 — J

"Metaphysics is the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or group of occasions, in the course of this or that piece of thinking." — R.G. Collingwood - An Essay on Metaphysics

"An absolute presupposition is one which stands, relatively to all questions to which it is related, as a presupposition, never as an answer."

"Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable. This does not mean that we should like to verify them but are not able to; it means that the idea of verification is an idea which does not apply to them...." — R.G. Collingwood - An Essay on Metaphysics

Having chosen an epistemic stance, one can deploy reason, logic, evidence, et al. to form judgments within that stance, and to continue to clarify the implications and use of that stance. But choosing the stance itself can never be a matter of rationality alone. This is why a stance is not so much believed (which would imply assenting to its truth) as adopted. This is also why, in Chakravartty’s view, disputes between realism and antirealism are rationally unresolvable. It’s important, though, to note that the realism/antirealism debate (which is the focus of Chakravartty’s paper) is only one place where the question of dueling epistemic stances arises. — J

A presupposition is an assumption that establishes the context for a philosophical or scientific discussion. — T Clark

I hope you find time to read the two papers. — J

I agree, this is in the same family as "epistemic stance," as used by Chakravartty and Pincock.
(@tim wood, above, also noticed the resemblance to Collingwood.). One difference may lie in the idea of an "absolute presupposition," which I think is too strong. For Chakravartty, at least, an epistemic stance is tentative, flexible, and dependent on a lot more than what I think you're calling metaphysics. — J

what bothered me the most is that realism and antirealism are set up as mutually exclusive and incomprehensible. Fact is, you can use both. — T Clark

whether the idea of objective reality is a useful one. — T Clark

Or perhaps I should ask, do you think there's a single version of what is rational -- and hence what should inform our epistemic stance -- when doing science? — J

OK. And would you say that's a voluntary epistemic stance, in Chakravartty's sense? — J

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you're trying to achieve the most logical outcome, then you should. — Philosophim

This, I think, is close to Chakravartty's sense. He specifies "minimal constraints of internal consistency and coherence” -- so, broadly speaking, logical. In that sense, then, you're saying that such a stance is not voluntary or optional; we should choose it. — J

This voluntarist position has to answer the objection made most recently by Christopher Pincock here (and in other places by other philosophers, of course). It is, in brief, that an epistemic stance that can, for instance, endorse scientific realism is made obligatory by a certain understanding of rationality. And this understanding (which, its proponents have to claim, is the only legitimate or defensible version) can be shown to rule out other epistemic stances as irrational. — J

How would you argue for that? Or do you think Pincock's position basically sets out that argument? — J

now read the Pincock paper (also linked)! — J

I think both Chakravartty and Pincock would agree that it is useful. Pincock, though, would add that it has the additional virtue of being real or true. — J

Focusing on metaphysics rather than epistemology is taking us farther and farther from the OP. — T Clark

{Doxastic voluntarism} is not, I take it, what is at issue in debates concerning scientific ontology, where voluntarism pertains to the adoption of underlying epistemic stances; let us call this stance voluntarism. Here, there is no question of choice per se regarding what to believe, and certainly not in any way that severs connections to and considerations of evidence. A stance, recall,
is an orientation comprising attitudes and policies relevant to assessing evidence; stances are thus at a remove from, or “upstream” from, the doxastic attitudes one may form regarding aspects of theories and models. Because the primary function of a stance is to distinguish domains of inquiry in which agents think evidence licenses belief from those where agnosticism seems more appropriate, adopting a stance suggests a much more innocent sense of “choice”: one reflecting an agent’s tolerances for epistemic risk. “Choice” in this context merely signals a recognition of the fact that there are rationally permissible alternatives, not that one can flip a switch and believe what one likes. — Resolving Debates about Scientific Realism, the Challenge From Stances

Great OP and interesting paper. — fdrake

I was wondering if Chakravartty or Pincock have any writings about how one might adapt one's values, or change stance, given evidence? — fdrake

The construal of an epistemic stance, and indeed of epistemic values, seems to be {in the paper's words} "upstream" of matters of fact and questions of ontology, rather than "alongside" or possibly "downstream" of matters of fact and question of ontology — fdrake

A stance doesn't judge matters of fact, it is a means by which matters of fact are judged - much like an assembly line for bikes can't be ridden as a bike. In that regard a commitment to a stance is an enactment of it. — fdrake

But that would render discoveries, facts, results - methodology - as potential changes for the admissibility of methodologies, and thus undermine a stance's construal as "upstream" from facts and matters of ontology. — fdrake

construing fact, method, methodology and meta-methodology as inferentially related. — fdrake

The flexibility that goes into defining what allows one to adopt or enact a stance seems to give such wiggle room. — fdrake

Yeah, that's what it would be if there's no "rigid rational" epistemic stance that can trump all others, and travel both upstream and downstream is permitted. — J

Or to stay with the river metaphor, does the justificatory stream flow in a single direction? — J

does this stance now put up a kind of dam against any pesky evidentiary salmon that wants to swim upstream with new information that could put the stance itself into question? — J

In the final analysis, all anyone can do when confronted by conflict between epistemic stances is engage in a dialogue in which conflicting attitudes, values, aims, and policies relevant to assessing evidence can be revealed, compared, and considered. I submit that this is exactly what happens, ultimately, in debates between scientific realists and antirealists. It is what happens, ultimately,
when experts testify in courts about the differences between teaching evolution and creationism in schools. To add to this dialogue the assurance that “I, not you, possess a uniquely rational epistemic stance” adds nothing of rhetorical or persuasive power. In contrast, to endeavor to elaborate, to explain, to scrutinize, and to understand the nature of opposing stances (to engage in what I call “collaborative epistemology” [2017a, 228])—and to encourage others, when our own stances appear to pass the tests of consistency and coherence, to see things our way, upon reflection—is to do our best. There is no insight into epistemic rationality to be gained by demanding more than this.

In earlier work (op. cit., 207–14), I consider families of stances that seem especially
influential in disputes about where to draw such lines between belief and agnosticism.
Those sympathetic to deflationary stances, for instance, are generally wary of aspiring to describe a mind-independent world, which they may view as conceptually problematic or otherwise naïve; this leads to redescriptions of the project of scientific ontology in different terms and rejections of traditionally realist conceptions of truth and reference, as found in a variety of neo-Kantian, pragmatist, and quietist approaches to science. Empiricist stances also suggest a wariness of the more fulsome
endorsements of scientific ontology associated with realism, questioning the necessity of acceding to demands for explanation of observable phenomena (or some other subset of scientific phenomena, closely linked to observation in some way) in terms of further, less immediately accessible phenomena, thereby resisting the idea that theorizing about things beyond the observable (etc.) need or should be
regarded as a basis for warranted belief. More metaphysically inclined stances, in contrast with both deflationary and empiricist ones, suggest more optimistic takes on the efficacy of scientific methods and the force of explanation for warranting beliefs in more expansive ontologies of things inhabiting a mind-independent world.

I submit that this is exactly what happens, ultimately, in debates between scientific realists and antirealists. It is what happens, ultimately, when experts testify in courts about the differences between teaching evolution and creationism in schools

To sharpen the question at issue, let us note first that pseudoscientific theories—
astrology, flat earth theory, homeopathy, and so forth—are not stances. They are bodies of putatively factual claims about the world.

This is not, I take it, what is at issue in debates concerning scientific ontology, where voluntarism pertains to the adoption of underlying epistemic stances; let us call this stance voluntarism. Here, there is no question of choice per se regarding what to believe, and certainly not in any way that severs connections to and considerations of evidence. A stance, recall, is an orientation comprising attitudes and policies relevant to assessing evidence; stances are thus at a remove from, or “upstream” from, the doxastic attitudes one may form regarding aspects of theories and models. Because the primary function of a stance is to distinguish domains of inquiry in which agents think evidence licenses
belief from those where agnosticism seems more appropriate, adopting a stance suggests a much more innocent sense of “choice”: one reflecting an agent’s tolerances for epistemic risk. “Choice” in this context merely signals a recognition of the fact that there are rationally permissible alternatives, not that one can flip a switch and believe what one likes. Clarifying the distinction between doxastic and stance voluntarism thus dissolves, in this context at least, Williams’s concern about engaging with reality in a serious way.

I don't really know what to do with this, and I might be missing a lot of subtleties, but my suspicion is that the distinctions between stance and doxastic attitudes, and stance and object level claims, aren't as clear as the argument needs to go through. — fdrake

I think the following is an option - upstream, downstream and alongside relations are allowed between stances and evidence, it just so happens that there is One True Dialectic that correctly links them. The One True Dialectic would have to fully understand how it related to all of its own principles, and conditions of revising them. I don't believe such a thing exists, but I would want an argument to rule it out. — fdrake

The paper advances the idea that a selection mechanism might work on stances, and render some of them rationally impermissible and some rationally permissible. Above and beyond that, there is the possibility of there being a single stance which is obligate to hold {about some domain}. — fdrake

. . . the core of the article's imaginative background on the matter. It cleaves the enactment of an epistemic stance from what it concerns, which could be read as cleaving how things are done from what's done, even though what's done influences how things are done through learning, and how things are done influences what's done through norms. — fdrake

It would then seem that the stance is secretly a list of propositions and attitudes toward them, rather than a means of assigning propositions to attitudes given a context — fdrake

An example there might be conservative Alice, who would never trust the scientific use of partially uninterpretable AI in scientific publications - and thus be agnostic about the conclusions of any paper using them. And cowboy Bob, who believes in the potential of AI and does not withhold belief on that basis. Alice and Bob would react differently to the relatively recent {almost total} solving of protein geometry given their base pair sequence by an AI, Alice would withhold belief, Bob would not.

Then, the applications of that technology happen, and new effective antibiotics are developed with these quick to press designer proteins. If everyone ought act in accordance with Alice's prohibition on trusting any fruits of AI, no one would have jumped ahead to produce the antibiotics, and we would live in a world with more death and pain as well as less scientific discovery. Alice's beliefs would have hampered the discovery of more truths, and that would be one fact among others. — fdrake

​Arthur Fine has prominently advanced a first challenge to all sides of the realist debates in a series of papers advocating the “Natural Ontological Attitude”, by asking what these debates are about. For example, they might be understood as advocating alternative goals for scientific inquiry (truth, empirical adequacy, instrumental reliability, advancing social interests, and the like). Realists and anti-realists attribute such goals to the sciences as an interpretation that “makes better sense” of scientific practices and achievements. Fine offers a trenchant reply:
Science is not needy [for interpretation] in this way. Its history and current practice constitute a rich and meaningful setting. In that setting, questions of goals or aims or purposes occur spontaneously and locally.
Michael Williams makes a similar argument in epistemology more generally, challenging the belief that “there is a general way of bringing together the genuine cases [of knowledge] into a coherent theoretical kind”, such that one can make a general case for realist or anti-realist interpretations of knowledge claims.

Another way to dissolve the realism question highlights a problematic commitment to the independence of meaning and truth. Anti-realists are evidently committed to such independence, because they endorse the possibility of understanding what scientific claims purport to say about the world, while denying the kind of access to what the world is “really” like needed to determine whether those claims are “literally” true. We can supposedly only discern whether claims are empirically adequate, instrumentally reliable, paradigmatically fruitful, rationally warranted, theoretically coherent, or the like. Realists nevertheless agree that understanding theoretical claims and determining whether they are correct are distinct and independent achievements.

For realists, it is a significant achievement to determine, for some scientific theory or hypothesis, that this claim, with its semantic content independently fixed, is true. If the determination of the truth or falsity of a claim were entangled with the interpretation of its content, however, such that what the claim says was not determinable apart from those interactions with the world through which we assess its truth, then realists would be unable to specify the claims (i.e., the contents of those claims) about which they want to be realists. Anti-realists in turn could not pick out their preferred proximate intermediary (perceptual appearances, instrumental reliability, social practices or norms) without invoking the worldly access they deny.

​Donald Davidson (1984) developed a classic criticism of this assumption and the realist and anti-realist positions that presuppose it. Davidson argued that the only way to justify an interpretation of what a claim says is to show that this interpretation maximizes the truthfulness and rationality of the entire set of beliefs and desires attributed to a speaker in conjunction with that interpretation. Otherwise, any attribution of false beliefs to the speaker would be justifiably open to a response that attributes the error to the interpretation rather than to the claims interpreted. Only against the background of extensive understanding of what is true can we also understand the objective purport and content of beliefs and utterances. Davidson rightly concluded that “Nothing, no thing, makes our sentences or theories true: not experience, not surface irritations, not the world...”

I am drawn to the critters of no try realism and anti-realism — Joshs

For realists, it is a significant achievement to determine, for some scientific theory or hypothesis, that this claim, with its semantic content independently fixed, is true. If the determination of the truth or falsity of a claim were entangled with the interpretation of its content, however, such that what the claim says was not determinable apart from those interactions with the world through which we assess its truth, then realists would be unable to specify the claims (i.e., the contents of those claims) about which they want to be realists.

I am drawn to the critters of no try realism and anti-realism
— Joshs

I'm dying to know what your software misunderstood here — J

about method or process which are believed/disbelieved/held as uncertain, not merely "adopted." We want to link propositions with these same attitudes within an epistemic stance -- that's the whole point of having one -- but where are we standing before the stance? What's the further argument that there are worse and better (maybe even obligatory) reasons for enacting the stance? — J

I know what you mean. If a non-voluntarist is going to claim that they have a rationally/theoretically mandatory epistemic stance, they will be asked their reasons for believing this. Will the reasons they give be the same kind of reasons that two people would give who share an epistemic stance but disagree on a particular scientific interpretation? This is hard to understand. And it tempts us to say that all this talk of stances is really a way of justifying some core propositions about method or process which are believed/disbelieved/held as uncertain, not merely "adopted." We want to link propositions with these same attitudes within an epistemic stance -- that's the whole point of having one -- but where are we standing before the stance? What's the further argument that there are worse and better (maybe even obligatory) reasons for enacting the stance? — J

I think it's upstreams all the way down. — fdrake

A dispute between Alice and Bob regarding sample size 19 vs 20 wouldn't just be about whether sample size 19 or 20 was good, it would be about whether it is reasonable to believe 19 or 20 is the minimum one to allow study results to update your beliefs. — fdrake

An IRL example of a thresholding dispute . . . — fdrake

there was no way to organise the putatively factual, the methodological concerns, and our values in a hierarchical fashion. There was no upstream or downstream. — fdrake