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Scientific Realism and Naturalistic Epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2022

Richard Boyd
Richard Boyd*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

By “scientific realism” philosophers ordinarily mean the doctrine that non-observational terms in scientific theories should typically be interpreted as putative referring expressions, and that when the semantics of theories is understood that way (“realistically“), scientific theories embody the sorts of propositions whose (approximate) truth can be confirmed by the ordinary experimental methods which scientists employ. There are as many possible versions of scientific realism as there are possible accounts of how “theoretical terms” refer and of how the actual methods of science function to produce knowledge.

What I will do in this paper is to explore the consequences of one such version of scientific realism, a version which embodies the implicatures as well as the implications of the realist slogan that reality is prior to thought.

Type
Part XII. Scientific Realism
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 613 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

The views in this paper were developed over the last decade. I have, therefore, had the opportunity to profit from discussions with a great many people, some of whom will not even remember our conversations. I want especially to thank William Alston, Ned Block, George Boolos, Sylvain Bromberger, Richard Cartwright, Norman Daniels, Hartry Field, Alan Gilbert, Carl Ginet, Alvin Goldman, Alex Goldstein, Kristin Guyot, Harold Hodes, Paul Horwich, Hilary Kornblith, Barbara Koslowski, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Miller, Henry Newell, Andrew Ortony, Mark Pastin, William Provine, Hilary Putnam, Israel Scheffler, Sydney Shoemaker, George Smith, Robert Stalnaker, Howard Stein, Nicholas Sturgeon, Robert Weingard, William Wimsatt and David Zaret.

Various parts of this paper were presented in graduate seminars at Cornell and at M.I IT. and in colloquia at Case-Western Reserve University, Princeton, The Rockefeller University, Rutgers, The State University of New York at Oswego, Syracuse University, Tufts, The University of Minnesota, The University of Chicago, The University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, and the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. I thank the audiences at these presentations for their helpful comments and criticisms.

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