"Atoms Exist" Is Probably True, and Other Facts That Should Not Comfort Scientific Realists

Abstract

‘Atoms Exist’ Is Probably True, And Other Facts That Should Not Comfort Scientific Realists P. Kyle Stanford University of California, Irvine Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science Total and sudden transformations of language seldom happen; conquests and migrations are now very rare: but there are other causes of change, which, though slow in their operation, and invisible in their progress, are perhaps as much superior to human resistance, as the revolutions of the sky, or intumescence of the tide. From the Preface to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755 1 Here I seek to clarify the actual points of disagreement between scientific realists and those critics of realism who are motivated by the historical record of scientific inquiry itself. I will suggest that a perfectly natural argumentative strategy deployed by such historicist critics has generated a fundamentally mistaken picture of what they themselves are committed to and what would be required to vindicate their resistance to scientific realism itself. I will go on to suggest that the central point of contention in debates concerning scientific realism is not whether particular existential commitments of contemporary scientific theories will be held to be true or whether particular theoretical terms will be regarded as referential by future scientific communities, but whether or not the future of science will exhibit the same broad pattern of repeated, profound, and