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Protagoras Among the Physicists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Alexander Rosenberg
Affiliation:
Syracuse University

Extract

Scientific realism at least in large measure reflects the conviction that physics limns the true nature of reality; that it is the right metaphysical picture of things. This conviction is in turn a product of the failure of positivism's attempt to expunge metaphysics from the corpus of philosophically respectable activities. Since natural science is objective knowledge of the world par excellence post-positivists have embraced it as the ontology which their predecessors had failed to make unnecessary. Scientific realism is metaphysics, shameless or unashamed.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1983

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References

1 van Fraassen, Bas, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All page references in this paper refer to this work.

2 Among them, The Einstein-Podolski-Rosen Paradox”, Synthese 29 (1974), 291309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilfred Sellars on Scientific Realism”, Dialogue 14 (1975), 606616CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “On the Radical Incompleteness of the Manifest Image”, in Asquith, and Suppe, F., eds., PSA 1976, vol. 2 (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1977), 335343Google Scholar; Hilary Putnam, Philosophy of Logic”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1975), 731743Google Scholar; To Save the Phenomena”, Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), 623632CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Pragmatics of Explanation”, American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977), 143150Google Scholar; “Modality”, in Kyburg, H., ed., Current Research in the Philosophy of Science (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1979), 182191Google Scholar; Theoretical Entities: The Five Ways”, Philosophia 4 (1974), 95109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Thus, given a distinction between realism and anti-realism as drawn by Putnam, Hilary, Mathematics, Matter and Method, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 69ffGoogle Scholar., or Dummett, Michael, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 146Google Scholar, van Fraassen locates his view as realist “since it also assumes scientific statements to have truth conditions independent of human activity or knowledge” (38).

4 Cf. Hempel, Carl, “The Theoretician's Dilemma”, in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: Macmillan, 1965)Google Scholar, which squarely faces the fact that positivist theories about the meaning of theoretical terms could not do justice to their methodological role while treating them as any sort of façon de parler for claims about observation.

5 The Inference to the Best Explanation”, Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 8895.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Reichenbach, Hans, The Direction of Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).Google Scholar

7 Cf. Putnam, , Mathematics,Google Scholar note 3, and Boyd, Richard, “Realism, Underdetermination and a Causal Theory of Evidence”, Nous 7 (1973), 112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Sneed, J., The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 For an attempt, combined with an attack on anti-realism in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, see Audi, M., The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).Google Scholar

10 See d'Espagnat, B., “Quantum Mechanics and Reality”, Scientific American 241 (1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a controversial introduction to the present situation in the experimental assessment of quantum mechanics.

11 This interpretation is ably defended in Plantinga, Alvin, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).Google Scholar