Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world
described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what it might
be taken to be. Within philosophy of science, it is often framed as an answer
to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The debate
over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status
of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories.
Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid
claims about unobservables as observables, as opposed to
instrumentalism. Main features
Scientific realism involves the two basic positions. First, it is a set of
claims about the features of an ideal scientific theory; an ideal theory is
the sort of theory science aims to produce. Second, it is the commitment
that science will eventually produce theories very much like an ideal theory
and that science has done pretty well thus far in some domains. It is
important to note that one might be a scientific realist regarding some
sciences while not being a realist regarding others. For example, one might
hold realist attitudes toward physics, chemistry and biology, and not toward
economics, psychology and sociology. According to scientific realism, an
ideal scientific theory has the following features:
The claims the theory makes are either true or false, depending on whether the
entities talked about by the theory exist and are correctly described by the
theory. This is the semantic commitment of scientific realism.
The entities described by the scientific theory exist objectively and
mind-independently. This is the metaphysical commitment of scientific
realism. There are reasons to believe some
significant portion of what the theory says. This is the epistemological
commitment. Combining the first and the second claim
entails that an ideal scientific theory says definite things about genuinely
existing entities. The third claim says that we have reasons to believe that
many scientific claims about these entities are true.
Scientific realism usually holds that science makes progress, i.e. scientific
theories usually get successively better, or, rather, answer more and more
questions. For this reason, many people, scientific realist or otherwise, hold
that realism should make sense of the progress of science in terms of theories
being successively more like the ideal theory that scientific realists
describe. = Characteristic claims=
The following claims are typical of those held by scientific realists. Due
to the wide disagreements over the nature of science's success and the role
of realism in its success, a scientific realist would agree with some but not
all of the following positions. The best scientific theories are at
least partially true. The best theories do not employ central
terms that are non referring expressions.
To say that a theory is approximately true is sufficient explanation of the
degree of its predictive success. The approximate truth of a theory is the
only explanation of its predictive success.
Even if a theory employs expressions that do not have a reference, a
scientific theory may be approximately true.
Scientific theories are in a historical process of progress towards a true
account of the physical world. Scientific theories make genuine,
existential claims. Theoretical claims of scientific
theories should be read literally and are definitively either true or false.
The degree of the predictive success of a theory is evidence of the referential
success of its central terms. The goal of science is an account of the
physical world that is literally true. Science has been successful because this
is the goal that it has been making progress towards.
History Scientific realism is related to much
older philosophical positions including rationalism and realism. However, it is
a thesis about science developed in the twentieth century. Portraying scientific
realism in terms of its ancient, medieval, and early modern cousins is at
best misleading. Scientific realism is developed largely
as a reaction to logical positivism. Logical positivism was the first
philosophy of science in the twentieth century and the forerunner of scientific
realism, holding that a sharp distinction can be drawn between
observational terms and theoretical terms, the latter capable of semantic
analysis in observational and logical terms.
Logical positivism encountered difficulties with:
The verification theory of meaning). Troubles with the analytic-synthetic
distinction). The theory ladenness of observation and
Quine). Difficulties moving from the
observationality of terms to observationality of sentences).
The vagueness of the observational-theoretical distinction).
These difficulties for logical positivism suggest, but do not entail,
scientific realism, and lead to the development of realism as a philosophy
of science. Realism became the dominant philosophy
of science after positivism. Bas van Fraassen developed constructive
empiricism as an alternative to realism. Responses to van Fraassen have sharpened
realist positions and lead to some revisions of scientific realism.
Arguments for and against One of the main arguments for scientific
realism centers on the notion that scientific knowledge is progressive in
nature, and that it is able to predict phenomena successfully. Many realists
think the operational success of a theory lends credence to the idea that
its more unobservable aspects exist, because they were how the theory
reasoned its predictions. For example, a scientific realist would argue that
science must derive some ontological support for atoms from the outstanding
phenomenological success of all the theories using them.
Arguments for scientific realism often appeal to abductive reasoning or
"inference to the best explanation". For instance, one argument commonly used -
the "miracle argument" - starts out by observing that scientific theories are
highly successful in predicting and explaining a variety of phenomena, often
with great accuracy. Thus, it is argued that the best explanation - the only
explanation that renders the success of science to not be what Hilary Putnam
calls "a miracle" - is the view that our scientific theories provide true
descriptions of the world, or approximately so.
On the other hand, pessimistic induction, one of the main arguments
against realism, argues that the history of science contains many theories once
regarded as empirically successful but which are now believed to be false.
Additionally, the history of science contains many empirically successful
theories whose unobservable terms are not believed to genuinely refer. For
example, the effluvial theory of static electricity is an empirically successful
theory whose central unobservable terms have been replaced by later theories.
Realists reply that replacement of particular realist theories with better
ones is to be expected due to the progressive nature of scientific
knowledge, and when such replacements occur only superfluous unobservables are
dropped. For example, Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity showed that
the concept of the luminiferous ether could be dropped because it had
contributed nothing to the success of the theories of mechanics and
electromagnetism. On the other hand, when theory replacement occurs, a
well-supported concept, such as the concept of atoms, is not dropped but is
incorporated into the new theory in some form.
Also against scientific realism social constructivists might argue that
scientific realism is unable to account for the rapid change that occurs in
scientific knowledge during periods of revolution. Constructivists may also
argue that the success of theories is only a part of the construction.
However, these arguments ignore the fact that many scientists are not realists.
In fact, during what is perhaps the most notable example of revolution in
science—the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s—the dominant
philosophy of science was logical positivism. The alternative realist Bohm
interpretation and many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics do
not make such a revolutionary break with the concepts of classical physics.
Another argument against scientific realism, deriving from the
underdetermination problem, is not so historically motivated as these others.
It claims that observational data can in principle be explained by multiple
theories that are mutually incompatible. Realists might counter by saying that
there have been few actual cases of underdetermination in the history of
science. Usually the requirement of explaining the data is so exacting that
scientists are lucky to find even one theory that fulfills it. Furthermore, if
we take the underdetermination argument seriously, it implies that we can know
about only what we have directly observed. For example, we could not
theorize that dinosaurs once lived based on the fossil evidence because other
theories can account for the same data. Realists claim that, in addition to
empirical adequacy, there are other criteria for theory choice, such as
parsimony. See also
Anti-realism Constructivist epistemology
Critical realism Instrumentalism
Naïve realism Pessimistic induction
Philosophical realism Scientific materialism
Social constructionism Footnotes
^ Jarrett Leplin, Scientific Realism, University of California Press, p. 1,
ISBN 0-520-05155-6 o.stanford.eduscientific-realism/#MirArg
Further reading Bunge, Mario.. Chasing Reality: Strife
over Realism. Toronto Studies in Philosophy: University of Toronto Press
Bunge, Mario.. Scientific Realism: Selected Essays of Mario Bunge. Mahner,
M. New York: Prometheus Books Devitt, Michael, "Scientific realism".
In: Oxford handbook of contemporary analytic philosophy
Hempel, Carl.. "Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance" in Boyd, Richard
et al. eds.. The Philosophy of Science Cambridge: MIT Press..
Kukla, A.. Social constructivism and the philosophy of science. London:
Routledge. Kuhn, Thomas.. The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Laudan, Larry.. "A Confutation of Convergent Realism" Philosophy of
Science Leplin, Jarrett.. Scientific Realism.
California: University of California Press.
Leplin, Jarrett.. A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. Lipton, Peter.. Inference to the best
explanation, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Maxwell, Grover. "The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities" in Feigl and
Maxwell Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time vol. 3, Minnesota Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, 3-15. Okasha, Samir.. Philosophy of science: A
very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See especially chapter
4, "Realism and Anti-Realism." Putnam, Hilary.. "What Theories are Not"
in Ernst Nagel et al.. Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science
Stanford University Press. Psillos, Stathis.. Scientific realism:
How science tracks truth. London: Routledge.
Quine, W.V.O.. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in his[1]. From a Logical
Point of View Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Quine, W.V.O.. Word and Object Cambridge: MIT Press.
Sankey, H.. "Scientific Realism: An Elaboration and a Defense" retrieved
from http:philsci-archive.pitt.edu External links
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry