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Realism and Methodological Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Jarrett Leplin
Jarrett Leplin*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
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Extract

An effective way to challenge scientific realism these days is to ask whether evidence for a theory’s truth can ever outstrip evidence for its utility. Granted that we might have strong evidence of a theory’s explanatory, predictive, heuristic, and technological utility, might we have in addition evidence of its truth? A negative answer claims that all the evidence in support of a theory is, immediately, evidence of pragmatic virtues, and only indirectly, if at all, evidence of truth. Realism then reduces to a willingness to infer truth from utility. Evidently, none of the evidence by which theories are tested will pertain to this inference, so the only recourse for sustaining it is to a metalevel at which truth and utility are compared in the abstract. And there enormous problems loom.

Type
Part XI. Realism, Methodology and Underdetermination
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 435 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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