Evidence, Explanation, and the Empirical Status of Scientific Realism (original) (raw)

A Defense for Scientific Realism: Skepticisms, Unobservables, & Inference to the Best Explanation

2017

The epistemological status of scientific knowledge claims has been undermined by skepticism, in particular by universal skepticism. This thesis asserts that Bas C. van Fraassen’s empirical stance is akin to universal skepticism. This work also maintains that van Fraassen’s empirical stance does not lead to the conclusion that scientific knowledge claims are empirically adequate—especially those claims that resulted from the scientific method of inference to the best explanation (IBE). To illustrate why van Fraassen’s stance does not devalue scientific knowledge claims will be suggested via Peter Lipton’s understanding of IBE combined with Ernan McMullin’s epistemic values. By bridging McMullin’s values with Lipton’s version of IBE, we get a more robust version of IBE; as a result, scientific claims may display a cluster of epistemic virtues and values. Where scientific knowledge claims display a cluster of epistemic virtues and values, they are simply beyond being empirically adequate.

An Ignored Argument for Scientific Realism

Filozofia Nauki, 2020

Why believe in scientific realism? The answer that overwhelms the mainstream debate is "the nomiracles argument" (NMA): realism best explains the observational success of scientific theories. Yet more than thirty years ago another argument was proposed by Smart, Devitt, Glymour, McMullin, and Salmon and called "the basic argument" (BA) by Devitt: realism best explains the observed phenomena. Rather than having been addressed and assessed since, BA has been almost entirely ignored. The paper carefully distinguishes BA from NMA and argues that whereas NMA is dubious, BA is good. Why has BA been ignored? Experience suggests that philosophers may find it too close to science and mistakenly hanker after a "more philosophical" justification for realism. No such justification is needed or desirable.

Two arguments for scientific realism unified

Inferences from scientific success to the approximate truth of successful theories remain central to the most influential arguments for scientific realism. Challenges to such inferences, however, based on radical discontinuities within the history of science, have motivated a distinctive style of revision to the original argument. Conceding the historical claim, selective realists argue that accompanying even the most revolutionary change is the retention of significant parts of replaced theories, and that a realist attitude towards the systematically retained constituents of our scientific theories can still be defended. Selective realists thereby hope to secure the argument from success against apparent historical counterexamples. Independently of that objective, historical considerations have inspired a further argument for selective realism, where evidence for the retention of parts of theories is itself offered as justification for adopting a realist attitude towards them. Given the nature of these arguments from success and from retention, a reasonable expectation is that they would complement and reinforce one another, but although several theses purport to provide such a synthesis the results are often unconvincing. In this paper I reconsider the realist's favoured type of scientific success, novel success, offer a revised interpretation of the concept, and argue that a significant consequence of reconfiguring the realist's argument from success accordingly is a greater potential for its unification with the argument from retention. 1 Musgrave (1988) argues that 'careful realists', at least since Whewell, have always intended the verification of novel predictions in discussions of scientific success. Worrall (1989b), , and Psillos (1999) each argue the importance of peculiarly novel success; many recent antirealist arguments also now pay particular attention to such results. 2 The most famous example of the antirealist challenge from the history of science is . Many interpret Laudan as defending a (pessimistic meta-) induction that implies our own theories are destined for replacement by new theories, radically incongruent with our own. Others (for example argue convincingly that Laudan should instead be understood as merely providing examples that at least appear to undermine the credibility of the realist's inference from success to approximate truth. On either interpretation historical considerations present the realist with a significant challenge.

Bayesianism v. scientific realism

Analysis, 2003

Scientific realism holds that we have good reason to regard our current best scientific theories as approximately true. Faced with the threat that corresponding to any given theory there can be inelegant, ad hoc, gerrymandered alternatives that accommodate the data of observation and experiment equally well, the scientific realist takes that which makes for the bestness of our current best theories, not just their empirical adequacy, as evidence for their (approximate) truth. Possession of theoretical virtues becomes an evidential consideration. In Stathis Psillos's book on scientific realism we read: As is well known, scientific realists typically suggest that when it comes to assessing the support which scientific theories enjoy, we should not examine only their empirical adequacy. This may be necessary but not enough on its own to make a theory well supported. We also need to take into account several theoretical virtues such as coherence with other established theories, consilience, completeness, unifying power, lack of ad hoc features and capacity to generate novel predictions. These virtues capture the explanatory power of a theory, and explanatory power is potentially confirmatory. (Psillos 1999: 171) Psillos goes on to stress that for the realist the possession of theoretical virtues is an evidential matter: claims about confirmation such as, 'e 1 confirms h but it wouldn't if I knew e 2 '. In what follows such additional information plays no role.

Idealization, Scientific Realism, and the Improvement Model of Confirmation

Science and Philosophy, 2020

That many of our most successful scientific theories involve one or more idealizations poses a challenge to traditional accounts of theory confirmation. One popular response amongst scientific realists is the "Improvement Model of Confirmation": if tightening up one or more of the idealizations leads to greater predictive accuracy, then this supports the belief that the theory's inaccuracy is a result of its idealizations and not because it is wrong. In this article I argue that the improvement model is deeply flawed and that therefore idealizations continue to undermine "success-to-truth" arguments for scientific realism.

Realism And Empirical Evidence

We define realism using a slightly modified version of the EPR criterion of reality. This version is strong enough to show that relativity is incomplete. We show that this definition of realism is nonetheless compatible with the general principles of causality and canonical quantum theory as well as with experimental evidence in the (special and general) relativistic domain. We show that the realistic theories we present here, compared with the standard relativistic theories, have higher empirical content in the strong sense defined by Popper's methodology. 1 Introduction The violation of Bell's inequality [2] predicted by quantum theory shows an incompatibility between classical realism, causality and relativistic quantum theory. Thus, if we use a strong enough axiom system for realism, we can prove that Einstein causality is false. In the first section we give such a definition of realism, based on a minor modification of the EPR criterion of reality. Thus, we have a confl...

The Unificatory Power of Scientific Realism

The no-miracles argument (Putnam, 1975) holds that science is successful because successful theories are (approximately) true. Frost-Arnold (2010) objects that this argument is unacceptable because it generates neither new predictions nor unifications. It is similar to the unacceptable explanation that opium puts people to sleep because it has a dormative virtue. I reply that on close examination, realism explains not only why some theories are successful but also why successful theories exist in current science. Therefore, it unifies the disparate phenomena.