Abstract

Decades of debate about scientific realism notwithstanding, we find ourselves bemused by what different philosophers appear to think it is, exactly. Does it require any sort of belief in relation to scientific theories and, if so, what sort? Is it rather typified by a certain understanding of the rationality of such beliefs? In the following dialogue we explore these questions in hopes of clarifying some convictions about what scientific realism is, and what it could or should be. En route, we encounter some profoundly divergent conceptions of the nature of science and of philosophy.

Highlights

  • Decades of debate about scientific realism notwithstanding, we find ourselves bemused by what different philosophers appear to think it is, exactly

  • Does it require any sort of belief in relation to scientific theories and, if so, what sort? Is it rather typified by a certain understanding of the rationality of such beliefs? In the following dialogue we explore these questions in hopes of clarifying some convictions about what scientific realism is, and what it could or should be

  • If the entry is more guarded, that tends to be with qualifications such as “approximately” or “for the most part,” which leaves intact the main impression, that scientific realism is the opposite of science skepticism

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Summary

Introduction

We see that the opposite of scientific realism is not science skepticism, though certain forms of skepticism—regarding the existence of an external world, or objective truth conditions, or taking scientific claims at face value, or the epistemic reach of descriptions extracted from theories and models—are ways of articulating opposition. Could someone be a scientific realist and not have such beliefs to the effect that certain unobservable entities are real, or that certain theories, which could be empirically adequate without being true, are true?2 The answer is yes, on my understanding of scientific realism as the view that the aim, the criterion of success in science is to arrive at true theories, rather than merely empirically adequate ones.

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