Realism in the Natural Sciences

Abstract

Realism is the theory that the ultimate objects of scientific inquiry exist and act (for the most part) quite independently of the scientists and their activity. The chapter discusses that the case for a metaphysical realism consisting in an elaboration of what the world is prior to any scientific investigation of it and for any scientific attitudes or behavior to be possible. Such realism neither presupposes nor licenses a realistic interpretation of any particular theory. The possibility of such a metaphysical, as distinct from “internal,” realism depends upon the establishment of the possibility of a philosophy, as distinct from sociology (or history) of science. Within philosophy, it also depends upon the possibility of ontology as distinct from epistemology. A realist position in the philosophy of science is a theory about the nature of the being, not the knowledge of the objects investigated by science roughly to the effect that they exist and act independently of human activity, and hence of both sense experience and thought. It is clear that any theory of the knowledge of objects entails some theory of the objects of knowledge; that every theory of scientific knowledge must logically presuppose a theory of what the world is like for knowledge, under the descriptions given it by the theory, to be possible.