Feyerabendian Pragmatism

Abstract

In the not-too-distant future the scientific realism debate will be absorbed into the far more ancient-and-venerable, old-and-unqualified, realism debate. The first efficient mover of this absorption will be the fact that scientific ontology is a growing and very mixed bag, including not just rocks, plants, animals, and stars, but the Higgs boson, the Big Bang, evolutionary pressures, teenage anxieties, economic growth, social trends, countries, industrial toxins, and hedge funds. Trying to hedge off these ever-stranger newcomers by such moves as castling the debate within well- (or best-) established, mature (two decades old? five?), basic physics is to submit to a biased umpire, with a narrow strike-zone, to get to an arbitrary first base.