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Ramsey Sentence Realism as an Answer to the Pessimistic Meta-Induction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mark Newman
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Abstract

John Worrall recently provided an account of epistemic structural realism, which explains the success of science by arguing for the correct mathematical structure of our theories. He accounts for the historical failures of science by pointing to bloated ontological interpretations of theoretical terms. In this paper I argue that Worrall's account suffers from five serious problems. I also show that Pierre Cruse and David Papineau have developed a rival structural realism that solves all of the problems faced by Worrall. This Ramsey sentence realism is a significant advance in the debate, but still ultimately fails for its incomplete account of reference

Type
Structural Realism
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 72 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2005 , pp. 1373 - 1384
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Many thanks to Craig Callender for his critical comments on this paper, as well as many hours of extremely helpful discussion on this topic in general. I would also like to thank Stathis Psillos.

References

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