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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Preservative realism and its discontents: Revisiting caloric
Philosophy of Science 70 (5):902-912 (2003)
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The Pessimistic Induction (PI) states: most past scientific theories were radically mistaken; therefore, current theories are probably similarly mistaken. But mistaken in what way? On the usual understanding, such past theories are false. However, on widely held views about reference and presupposition, many theoretical claims of previous scientific theories are neither true nor false. And if substantial portions of past theories are truth-valueless, then the PI leads to semantic antirealism. But most current philosophers of science reject semantic antirealism. So PI (...) |
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The “No Miracle Argument” for scientific realism contends that the only plausible explanation for the predictive success of scientific theories is their truthlikeness, but doesn’t specify what ‘truthlikeness’ means. I argue that if we understand ‘truthlikeness’ in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, the resulting realist thesis (RKL) is a plausible explanation for science’s success. Still, RKL probably falls short of the realist’s ideal. I argue, however, that the strongest version of realism that the argument can plausibly establish is RKL. The (...) |
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I argue that scientific realism, insofar as it is only committed to those scientific posits of which we have causal knowledge, is immune to Kyle Stanford’s argument from unconceived alternatives. This causal strategy is shown not to repeat the shortcomings of previous realist responses to Stanford’s argument. Furthermore, I show that the notion of causal knowledge underlying it can be made sufficiently precise by means of conceptual tools recently introduced into the debate on scientific realism. Finally, I apply this strategy (...) |
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While scientific realism generally assumes that successful scientific explanations yield information about reality, realists also have to admit that not all information acquired in this way is equally well warranted. Some versions of scientific realism do this by saying that explanatory posits with which we have established some kind of causal contact are better warranted than those that merely appear in theoretical hypotheses. I first explicate this distinction by considering some general criteria that permit us to distinguish causal warrant from (...) |
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Debates about scientific realism are closely connected to almost everything else in the philosophy of science, for they concern the very nature of scientific knowledge. Scientific realism is a positive epistemic attitude toward the content of our best theories and models, recommending belief in both observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences. This epistemic attitude has important metaphysical and semantic dimensions, and these various commitments are contested by a number of rival epistemologies of science, known collectively (...) |
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(i) Scientific realism is primarily a metaphysical doctrine about the existence and nature of the unobservables of science. (ii) There are good explanationist arguments for realism, most famously that from the success of science, provided abduction is allowed. Abduction seems to be on an equal footing, at least, with other ampliative methods of inference. (iii) We have no reason to believe a doctrine of empirical equivalence that would sustain the underdetermination argument against realism. (iv) The key to defending realism from (...) |
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In scientific realist eyes we are only warranted to assert that a theory is true or approximately true if that theory enjoys considerable explanatory and predictive success. The most well known challenge to this claim, the pessimistic meta-induction, holds that the history of science is replete with successful theories that are now considered false. In effect, this challenge raises doubts about the reliability of inferences from explanatory and predictive success to (approximate) truth. The main realist reaction has been to argue (...) |
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Summary: Responding to Laudan’s skeptical reading of history an influential group of realists claim that the seriously wrong claims past successful theories licensed were not really implicated in the predictions that once singled them out as successful. For example, in the case of Fresnel’s theory of light, it is said that although he appealed to the ether he didn’t actually need to in order to derive his famous experimental predictions—in them, we are assured, the ether concept was “idle,” “inessential,” “peripheral” (...) |
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"Partial realism" is a common position in the contemporary philosophy of science literature. It states that the "essential" elements of empirically successful scientific theories accurately represent corresponding features the world. This thesis makes several novel contributions related to this position. Firstly, it offers a new definition of the concept of “empirical success”, representing a principled merger between the use-novelty and unification accounts. Secondly, it provides a comparative critical analysis of various accounts of which elements are "essential" to the success of (...) |
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In this dissertation, I examine a view called ‘Epistemic Structural Realism’, which holds that we can, at best, have knowledge of the structure of the physical world. Put crudely, we can know physical objects only to the extent that they are nodes in a structure. In the spirit of Occam’s razor, I argue that, given certain minimal assumptions, epistemic structural realism provides a viable and reasonable scientific realist position that is less vulnerable to anti-realist arguments than any of its rivals. |
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In this thesis I will examine the philosophy of the physicist Max Born. As well as his scientific work, Born wrote on a number of philosophical topics: causation, realism, determinism, and probability. They appear as an interest throughout his career, but he particularly concentrates on them from the 1940s onwards. Born is a significant figure in the development of quantum mechanics whose philosophical work has been left largely unexamined. It is the aim of this thesis to elucidate and to critically (...) |
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According to retail realism, we ought to abandon wholesale arguments, which purport to demonstrate realism or anti-realism about theoretical entities in general, and embrace retail arguments, which purport to demonstrate realism or anti-realism about specific kinds of theoretical entities. My aim is to argue that there is a further wholesale element that retail realism must avoid in order to qualify as a viable position. In order to do so, I distinguish between what I call wholesale and retail treatments of theoretical (...) |
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Structural realists of nearly all stripes endorse the structural continuity claim. Roughly speaking, this is the claim that the structure of successful scientific theories survives theory change because it has latched on to the structure of the world. In this paper I elaborate, elucidate and modify the structural continuity claim and its associated argument. I do so without presupposing a particular conception of structure that favours this or that kind of structural realism. Instead I focus on how structural realists can (...) |
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In this paper I wish to connect the recent debate in the philosophy of quantum mechanics concerning the nature of the wave function to the historical debate in the philosophy of science regarding the tenability of scientific realism. Being realist about quantum mechanics is particularly challenging when focusing on the wave function. According to the wave function ontology approach, the wave function is a concrete physical entity. In contrast, according to an alternative viewpoint, namely the primitive ontology approach, the wave (...) |
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