It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...) to argue in favour of scientific realism or constructive empiricism by showing that one set of values is exclusively best, for anyone and everyone, and that the downstream choice of the philosophy of science which best serves those values is therefore best, for anyone and everyone. These efforts, however, seem to have failed. In response, I suggest that philosophers of science should suspend the effort to determine which philosophy of science is best for everyone, and instead begin investigating which philosophy of science is best for specific people, with specific values, in specific contexts. I illustrate how this might be done by briefly sketching a single case study from the history of science, which seems to show that different philosophies of science are better at motivating different forms of scientific practice. (shrink)

Inference to the Best Explanation has become the subject of a livelydebate in the philosophy of science. Scientific realists maintain, while scientificantirealists deny, that it is a compelling rule of inference. It seems that anyattempt to settle this debate empirically must beg the question against theantirealist. The present paper argues that this impression is misleading. A methodis described that, by combining Glymour's theory of bootstrapping and Hacking'sarguments from microscopy, allows us to test IBE without begging any antirealistissues.

To save antirealism from Fitch's Paradox, Tennant has proposed to restrict the scope of the antirealist principle that all truths are knowable to truths that can be consistently assumed to be known. Although the proposal solves the paradox, it has been accused of doing so in an ad hoc manner. This paper argues that, first, for all Tennant has shown, the accusation is just; second, a restriction of the antirealist principle apparently weaker than Tennat's yields a non-ad hoc solution to (...) Fitch's Paradox; and third, the alternative is only apparently weaker than, and even provably equivalent to, Tennant's. It is thereby shown that the latter is not ad hoc after all. (shrink)

The writings of Kuhn and Feyerabend on incommensurability challenged the idea that science progresses towards the truth. Davidson famously criticized the notion of incommensurability, arguing that it is incoherent. Davidson's argument was in turn criticized by Kuhn and others. This article argues that, although at least some of the objections raised against Davidson's argument are formally correct, they do it very little harm. What remains of the argument once the objections have been taken account of is still quite damaging to (...) the thesis that formerly endorsed scientific theories are incommensurable with those of today's science. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the rule of inference proposed by Kuipers under the name of Inference to the Best Theory. In particular, I argue that the rule needs to be strengthened if it is to serve realist purposes. I further describe a method for testing, and perhaps eventually justifying, a suitably strengthened version of it.