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Scientific Realism in Real Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Roger Jones
Roger Jones*
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee
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Extract

Scientific realism is a doctrine about the relationship of our ideas on the nature of things to the nature of things itself. Part of the doctrine is that there is a nature of things itself. With regard to the rest, Jarrett Leplin has said, “Like the Equal Rights Movement, scientific realism is a majority position whose advocates are so divided as to appear a minority” (Leplin 1984, p. 1). Still, it can be said that what realists would like is that the account of the nature of things provided by science be true and that those things really exist.

Characterized in this way, realism would seem to be a majority position indeed. As Ernst Mach has said of the doctrine,

It has arisen in the process of immeasurable time without the intentional assistance of man. It is a product of nature, and is preserved by nature. Everything that philosophy has accomplished…is, as compared with it, but an insignificant and ephemeral product of art. The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation…, immediately returns [to realism]. (Mach 1959, p. 37, quoted in Fine 1986, p. 134)

Type
Part VI. Realism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 167 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

The research on which this paper is based was partially supported by National Science Foundation Grant SES-86-18758. I would like to thank Paul Teller, Arthur Fine, and Ernan McMullin for comments on an earlier version.

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