No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Contemporary arguments for scientific realism are typically based on some form of inference to the best explanation. Sometimes such arguments concern the methods of science: given the success of scientific methodology, realism offers the best explanation of this success. Sometimes such arguments concern the content of scientific theories: given observed regularities in nature, explanations must be given of those regularities; the best such explanations will be realist. One forceful explanationist argument about the content of science can be based on Hans Reichenbach’s Principle of the Common Cause (CC). Roughly, CC says that whenever an enduring correlation between two events is observed, there must be some preceding event which is the common cause of the two, and is the explanation for the correlation. Rigid adherence to this demand for a common cause, however, supposedly goes beyond the instrumentalist explanatory resources available to the antirealist, and hence CC is taken to be a sufficient condition for realism. Further, one might claim that any argument that realism has greater explanatory power than antirealism depends either explicitly or implicitly on CC, and hence CC is also a necessary condition for realism.
1 See Van Fraassen, Bas esp. The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980), esp. 25-6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Reichenbach, Hans Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1938), 108Google Scholar
3 Van Fraassen’s view of Reichenbach may not be entirely accurate, but then Reichenbach is not Van Fraassen’s main target. He really has in mind the views of Wesley Salmon here.
4 Putnam, Hilary ‘What Is Scientific Realism?’ reprinted in Leplin, Jarett ed. Scientific Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984 19Google Scholar
5 Reichenbach, Hans Reichenbach, Maria ed., The Direction of Time (Berkeley: University of California Press 1956), 157Google Scholar
6 See The Direction of Time, 158–9.
7 Salmon, Wesley ‘Why Ask, “Why?”? An Inquiry Concerning Scientific Explanation,’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 51 1979 698-9Google Scholar
8 Cartwright, Nancy Nature’s Capacities and their Measurement (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), 2Google Scholar
9 Salmon, Wesley Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984), 168Google Scholar
10 Mermin, David ‘Quantum Mysteries for Anyone,’ Journal of Philosophy 78 1981 397-408CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Fraassen, Bas The Scientific ImageGoogle Scholar; Van Fraassen, Bas ‘The Charybdis of Realism: Epistemological Implications of Bell’s Inequality,’ Synthese 52(1982) 25–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fine, Arthur ‘Hidden Variables, Joint Probability, and the Bell Inequalities,’ Physical Review Letters 48 (1982) 291–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fine, Arthur ‘Do Correlations Need To Be Explained?’ in Cushing, James T. and McMullin, Ernan Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1989) 175–94Google Scholar
11 Einstein, A. Podolsky, B. Rosen, N. ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ Physical Review 47 (1935) 777-80CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 This is not required; a similar, more general result holds for all values of Pr(F) and Pr(G).
13 It is puzzling that Van Fraassen insists on describing the phenomenon as irreducible and indeterministic. These attributes are neither necessary nor sufficient for his argument. What matters is that S is a complete description. This puzzle was pointed out to me by Arthur Fine.
14 A view shared by Nancy Cartwright; see 234–5.
15 Salmon, ‘Why Ask, “Why?”?’; Alan Stairs, ‘Sailing Into the Charybdis: Van Fraassen on Bell’s Theorem,’ Synthese 61 (1984): 351-9Google Scholar; Cartwright
16 The example here need not be a theological one. The central point is that if realism is logically possible, then it is also logically possible that realism could hold true in worlds where CC does not hold true.
17 ‘Realism and Quantum Mechanics,’ in van der Merwe, A. et al., eds., Microphysical Reality and Quantum Formalism (Boston: Reidel 1987) 103-13Google Scholar