Eclectic realism is defended against the criticism in Busch by clarifying its terminological and conceptual basis, and by comparing it with structural and semirealism.Keywords: Realism; Pessimistic induction; Augustin Jean Fresnel; Eclectic realism; Semi-realism.

This book is about the methods used for unifying different scientific theories under one all-embracing theory. The process has characterized much of the history of science and is prominent in contemporary physics; the search for a 'theory of everything' involves the same attempt at unification. Margaret Morrison argues that, contrary to popular philosophical views, unification and explanation often have little to do with each other. The mechanisms that facilitate unification are not those that enable us to explain how or why (...) phenomena behave as they do. A feature of this book is an account of many case studies of theory unification in nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics and of how evolution by natural selection and Mendelian genetics were unified into what we now term evolutionary genetics. (shrink)

This is a philosophical and historical investigation of the role of inconsistent representations of the same scientific phenomenon. The logical difficulties associated with the simultaneous application of inconsistent models are discussed. Internally inconsistent scientific proposals are characterized as structures whose application is necessarily tied to the confirming evidence that each of its components enjoys and to a vision of the general form of the theory that will resolve the inconsistency. Einstein's derivation of the black body radiation law is used as (...) an example application of such a strategy and is contrasted with planck's derivation. (shrink)

Inconsistent representations of the world have in fact played and should play a role in scientific inquiry. However, it would seem that logical analysis of such representations is blocked by the explosive nature of deductive inference from inconsistent premisses. "Paraconsistent logics" have been suggested as the proper way to remove this impediment and to make explication of the logic of inconsistent scientific theories possible. I argue that installing paraconsistent logic as the underlying logic for scientific inquiry is neither a necessary (...) nor a sufficient condition for giving a philosophical alternative, I suggest that identification of heuristic strategies, based on the network of confirming evidence for inconsistent proposals for reasoning from such proposals to their consistent replacements is the proper way to explicate their function in science. (shrink)

This paper erects a framework for analyzing some idealized models as (what I call) inferentially veridical representations. It adopts a version of the semantic view of theories that focuses on properties, and mobilizes conceptual resources associated with properties and the way that properties are related in various ways. The outcome is an elaboration of some aspects of the analysis of Jones (2005).

In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.

The properties colored and red stand in a special relation. Namely, red is a determinate of colored, and colored is determinable relative to red. Many other properties are similarly related. The determination relation is an interesting topic of logical investigation in its own right, and the prominent philosophical inquiries into this relation have, accordingly, operated at a high level of abstraction.1 It is time to return to these investigations, not just as a logical amusement, but for the payoffs such investigation (...) can yield in solving some basic metaphysical problems. The goal in what follows is twofold. First, I argue for a novel understanding of the determination relation. Second, this understanding is applied to yield insights into property instance (e.g., trope) individuation, how different property types can share an instance, the relation between property types and property instances, as well as applications to causation (mental causation, in particular). (shrink)

The old quantum theory of black body radiation was manifestly logically inconsistent. It required the energies of electric resonators to be both quantized and continuous. To show that this manifest inconsistency was inessential to the theory's recovery of the Planck distribution law, I extract a subtheory free of this manifest inconsistency but from which Planck's law still follows.

This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific (...) realism. (shrink)

I show that the standard approach to modeling phenomena involving microscopic classical electrodynamics is mathematically inconsistent. I argue that there is no conceptually unproblematic and consistent theory covering the same phenomena to which this inconsistent theory can be thought of as an approximation; and I propose a set of conditions for the acceptability of inconsistent theories.

There is good reason to suppose that our best physical theories are false: In addition to its own internal problems, the standard formulation of quantum mechanics is logically incompatible with special relativity. I will also argue that we have no concrete idea what it means to claim that these theories are approximately true.