In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.

Hilary Putnam has been convinced for some time that the present situation in philosophy calls for revitalization and renewal; in this latest book he shows us ...

Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life. The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions.

Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...) view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. (shrink)

This is the third volume of Hilary Putnam's philosophical papers, published in paperback for the first time. The volume contains his major essays from 1975 to 1982, which reveal a large shift in emphasis in the 'realist'_position developed in his earlier work. While not renouncing those views, Professor Putnam has continued to explore their epistemological consequences and conceptual history. He now, crucially, sees theories of truth and of meaning that derive from a firm notion of reference as inadequate.

In "Unnatural Science"(1) Catherine Elgin examines the dilemma which David Lewis sees posed by Putnam's model-theoretic argument against realism. One horn of the dilemma commits us to seeing truth as something all too easily come by, a virtue to be attributed to any theory meeting relatively minimal conditions of adequacy. The other horn commits us to "anti-nominalism", some version of the ancient doctrine that language must "carve nature at the joints": that there are natural kinds or classes which alone qualify (...) as referents (extensions) for our predicates. Elgin offers a searching critique of Lewis' response (accepting the second horn) and an illuminating defence of its contrary: "we cannot construe (mere) truth as the end of scientific inquiry. Not ... because truth is too hard to come by, but because it is too easy" (p. 301). (shrink)

This paper gives a new twist to already familia refutations of Putnam's "model-theoretic" argument against realism. Recent attempts to defend the model-theoretic argument in the face of those criticisms indicate that the main point of previous rebuttals of the argument can be easily missed. The paper expounds the same point again in a different guise, by having recourse to ideas on models and the model-theoretic account of the logical properties developed by the author in earlier work. Some writers appear to (...) think that the charge of previous criticisms is that Putnam's argument begs the question, by involving as premise a proposition which all too obviously entails the falsity of realism--precisely what the argument is designed to establish. They then defend it by claiming that Putnam does not simply _take for granted<D> the truth of the offending premise, but _argues for<D> it. This, however, does not defend Putnam's argument against the _pragmatic<D> charges of irrelevancy and potential for provoking confusion--which, the paper shows, can be taken as the main criticisms levelled against it by previous writers. The point is that, if Putnam has an independent argument for the question-begging premise, one not involving any model-theoretic considerations, then this is all that is needed; the specifically model-theoretic considerations are irrelevant and could lead to spurious debates. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue for a realist metaphysics in an unusual way. I do not contend that realism is the only viable metaphysics. In fact, I argue that it is not. I do not argue for realism on the grounds that it correctly describes what is ultimately and objectively the case. Instead, I argue for realism on the grounds that it makes the best sense of our practices. I view the choice of a metaphysics as a practical choice about (...) how to talk about our theorizing. ;Realism maintains that there is a single way that the world is that is independent of us. This assertion involves three distinct claims. It involves the claim that there is a structure to the world; that there is only one such structure; and that this unique structure is independent of us. I define realism as any position that is committed to all three of these claims. Consequently, any position that denies any one of these three claims is a non-realist position. ;Since for any collection of predicates, the world affords a satisfaction pattern for those predicates, being restrictive about structures requires being restrictive about which predicates are such that their satisfaction pattern defines a structure. Thus, the realist, who claims that there is only one such structure to the world, needs to be quite restrictive concerning just which predicates are structure-defining. Because the realist is committed to the structure being independent of us, the structure-defining nature of predicates must likewise be independent of us. Non-realists are typically less restrictive about which predicates are eligible for defining structures of the world. ;A popular, and rather immediate, objection to non-realism is that by denying the existence of an independent structure of the world non-realism cannot make adequate sense of the empirical nature of science. If this objection to non-realism is correct, then non-realism is doomed from the very start since an adequate account of science is absolutely mandatory for any metaphysics. I argue that contrary to the charges of many realists, many different forms of non-realism can make as much sense of the empirical nature of scientific theorizing as realism can. ;I also argue against the most influential objections to realism. One such charge is that realism produces new skeptical problems. Note that, according to realism, the way that the world is depends, in part, on which properties are structure-defining. Since we do not have epistemic access to facts about which properties are structure-defining, we ipso facto cannot have epistemic access to the structure that such properties define. Thus realism is alleged to render reality utterly unknowable. This is a mistake. Realism merely maintains that certain age-old skepticisms are genuine possibilities. ;One might argue that non-realism is preferable to realism in virtue of solving or avoiding these traditional skeptical problems. First, the non-realist does not solve these problems, but rather avoids them by making sense of our practices without the realist presuppositions of traditional skepticisms. Second, it is unclear whether such a solution is any better than a skepticism that we, as realists, simply refuse to worry about. Hence, although one can reasonably prefer non-realism to realism because of its treatment of skepticism, I argue that one need not do so. Ultimately, I argue that, all things considered, realism is the best metaphysical system going. (shrink)