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Modest Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

William Newton-Smith
William Newton-Smith*
Affiliation:
Oxford University
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Extract

It was once fashionable to treat realism as an explanatory theory of science. This realism treats the sentences of science, both observational and theoretical, literally: such sentences are true or false as the case may be in some correspondence sense of truth. To this was added the epistemological claims that it was in principle possible to discover whether any given sentence was in fact true or false and that science has been progressive. In view of the fact that theories seemed to have a bad track-record - from the point of view of truth they all seem sooner or later come unstuck - the realist offered a more modest goal for science; producing more approximately true theories. The strategy for defending realism was explanatory. The realist claimed that inference to the best explanation (hereafter cited as IBE) was a standard epistemic tool of the scientist and ought to be available to the philosopher.

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. 179 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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