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Ontic Realism and Scientific Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Michael Bradie
Michael Bradie*
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University
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Abstract

Wesley Salmon defends an ontic realism that distinguishes explanatory from descriptive knowledge. Explanatory knowledge makes appeals to (unobservable) theoretical acausal mechanisms. Salmon presents an argument designed both to legitimize attributing truth values to theoretical claims and to justify treating theoretical claims as descriptions. The argument succeeds but only at the price of calling the distinction between explanation and description into question. Even if Salmon’s attempts to distinguish causal mechanisms from other mechanisms are successful, the assumed centrality of the appeal to such mechanisms in providing scientific explanations is left open by Salmon’s account.

Type
Realism and Anti-Realism
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 63 , Issue S3 , 1996 , pp. S315 - S321
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1996

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Footnotes

†

Some of the research for this paper was done while I was a fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. I want to thank Wes Salmon, Bas van Fraassen, Nick Rescher, David Hilbert and lunchtime colloquium participants for helpful comments on earlier versions.

‡

Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, 1001 E. Wooster St., Bowling Green, OH 43403.

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