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Critiques of the Pessimistic Induction
The pessimistic induction (PI) should not be conflated with Laudan’s objection that there are historical counterexamples to realism, nor with the...
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Incompatibility and the pessimistic induction: a challenge for selective realism
Two powerful arguments have famously dominated the realism debate in philosophy of science: The No Miracles Argument (NMA) and the Pessimistic...
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Scientific Realism and Scientific Practice
Does the realism debate matter for scientific practice? Shaw attempts to justify a positive answer to this question by providing a scientific episode...
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Scientific Realism: A Defence
In the present chapter, I propose a way of defending epistemological scientific realism that differs from the usual explanationist strategies....
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The Anti-Metaphysical Argument Against Scientific Realism: A Minimally Metaphysical Response
The anti-metaphysical argument against scientific realism (AMA) is the following: (1) Knowledge of unobservable entities implies metaphysical...
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Two construals of Hempel’s dilemma: a challenge to physicalism, not dualism
In a recent paper, Firt, Hemmo and Shenker argue that Hempel’s dilemma, typically thought to primarily undermine physicalism, is generalizable and...
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How realist is informational structural realism?
Informational structural realism (ISR) offers a new way to understand the nature of the “structure” that structural realists claim our best...
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Scientific Realism and Further Underdetermination Challenges
In an earlier article on this journal I argued that the problem of empirical underdetermination can for the largest part be solved by theoretical...
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Desperate Acts and Compromises
This article expands on what Bernard Stiegler describes as “The Ordeal of Truth”. Through an evolutionary account of cognition and its...
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Structural realism and generative linguistics
Linguistics as a science has rapidly changed during the course of a relatively short period. The mathematical foundations of the science, however,...
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Scientific Perspectivism and psychiatric diagnoses: respecting history and constraining relativism
Historians and sociologists of psychiatry often claim that psychiatric diagnoses are discontinuous. That is, a particular diagnoses will be described...
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The preservation of thickly detectable structure: a case study in gravity
Structural realists claim that structure is preserved across instances of radical theory change, and that this preservation provides an argument in...
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Some problems with particularism
Particularists maintain that conspiracy theories are to be assessed individually, while generalists hold that conspiracy theories may be assessed as...
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Emergence, Continuity, and Scientific Realism
Scientific realism postulates that science aims for truth in both the domains of the observable and the unobservable, and is capable of achieving...
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Key Arguments Against Scientific Realism
In this chapter, I present in canonical (or standard) form and then evaluate key arguments against scientific realism (or for antirealism about...
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The Propagation of Suspension of Judgment.
It is not uncommon in the history of science and philosophy to encounter crucial experiments or crucial objections the truth-value of which we are...
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Quasi-structural Realism
Devising an appropriate formal framework for structural realism has long been an issue in the development of this position. Décio Krause has...
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Conceptual Engineering Between Representational Skepticism and Complacency: Is There a Third Way?
Conceptual engineering has been linked by Herman Cappelen to a position called “representational skepticism”, described as one’s refusal to...
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Towards a Structuralist Elimination of Properties
Scientific realists investigate the ontology of the world and explain the observed phenomena by using our best fundamental physical theories. These...