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PPE Notes Philosophy of Science & Philosophy of Social Science Notes

Scientific Realism Structural Realism And Constructive Empiricism Notes

Updated Scientific Realism Structural Realism And Constructive Empiricism Notes

Philosophy of Science & Philosophy of Social Science Notes

Philosophy of Science & Philosophy of Social Science

Approximately 50 pages

These notes provide both a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of science and the philosophy of social science, and include both essential and advanced topics and literature surveys.
They are clear, logically organised and easy to read but do not compromise on detail or accuracy. They include summaries of arguments from both well-known and more obscure texts and authors, as well as the most important direct quotes from the text, along with critical analysis.
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Scientific Realism & alternatives

Understanding Philosophy of Science – J. Ladyman

  • Scientific realism is roughly the view the we should believe in the unobservable objects postulated by our best scientific theories.

  • “Once we adopt the primary/secondary distinction we need to explain the relationship between our experience of things and their primary properties, and also how we can know about the primary properties of things at all.”

  • Metaphysical realism: our language refers to (and sometimes says true things about) a mind independent world.

  • Direct realism: there are external objects that exist independently of our minds and which we directly perceive with the senses.

  • Ideaism [sic]: We do not directly perceive objects but rather our minds’ own ideas/representations of the world.

    • NB not a thesis about what exists, so compatible with e.g. metaphysical realism.

  • Causal realism: there are external objects that exist independently of our minds and which cause our indirect perception of them via the senses.

  • Berkeley denied the existence of matter and the distinction between primary and secondary properties.

  • Logical positivism: the content of our thoughts must somehow be tied to ideas the mind acquires through sensory experience. This implies that no matter of fact that can be intelligibly or meaningfully thought about can go beyond all possible experience.

  • Many empiricists take our knowledge of our sensory states to be foundational.

  • Semantic instrumentalism: the theoretical terms of scientific theories should not be taken literally as referring to unobservable entities, because they are merely logical constructs used as tools for systematising relations between phenomena.

  • Reductive empiricism: theoretical terms can be defined in terms of observational concepts; theories shouldn’t be taken as literally referring to unobservables.

  • “Some forms of antirealism are based not on the elimination of theoretical terms, but on theories of truth that deny the realist concept of truth as correspondence between language and the world.”

  • (Traditional) Realism involves 3 commitments:

  1. Metaphysical commitment to the existence of a mind-independent world, including unobservables.

  2. Semantic commitment to literal interpretation of theories and a correspondence theory of truth.

  3. Epistemological commitment to the claim that we can know that our best current theories are approximately true & successfully refer.

  • Van Fraassen accepts 1 and 2 but not 3.

    • “[A]cceptance of the best theories in modern science does not require belief in the entities postulated by them.”

  • Objections to constructive empiricism:

    • Line between observable and unobservable is vague and changes with time

      • It grants ontological significance to an arbitrary distinction.

    • Underdetermination of theory by evidence is the only positive argument for adopting constructive empiricism, and this isn’t a very good argument. (See Psillos)

  • vF agrees that unobservable entities may exist, but thinks the boundary between what we can and cannot know exists coincides with the (changing) boundary between the observable and unobservable.

    • The ‘able’ in observable refers to our limitations qua human beings.

    • But then critics ask why we’re allowed to imagine changing our spatiotemporal location but not our sensory apparatus.

  • “Realists have argued that constructive empiricism depends upon a substantive distinction between acceptance and belief that is simply not available.”

    • Objection: belief has the extra causal role of disposing someone to assert, “I believe T to be true”.

      • But Horwich argues that such differences in behaviour are the result not of a difference between belief and acceptance but are the product of ‘philosophical double-talk’.

  • “Constructive empiricism is an idealisation, but to idealise here seems legitimate since the realist has just as many if not more problems with partial belief or belief in partial or approximate truth, as van Fraassen does with partial empirical adequacy.”

‘A Confutation of Convergent Realism’ – Larry Laudan

  • “Taking the success of present and past theories as givens, proponents of CER claim that if CER were true, it would follow, as a matter of course, that science would be successful and progressive. Equally, they allege that if CER were false, the success of science would be ‘miraculous’ and without explanation.”

  • “The realist sense of reference is a rather liberal one, according to which the terms in a theory may be genuinely referring even if many of the claims the theory makes about the entities to which it refers are false.”

  • “To have a genuinely referring theory is to have a theory that ‘cuts the world at its joints’, a theory that postulates entities of a kind that really exist.”

    • “But a genuinely referring theory need not be such that all – or even most – of the specific claims it makes about the properties of those entities and their modes of interaction are true.”

  • Part of what separates the realist from the positivist is the former’s belief that the evidence for a theory is evidence for everything the theory asserts.

  • “If the realist once concedes that some unspecified set of the terms of a successful theory may well not refer, then his proposals for restricting ‘the class of candidate theories’ to those that retain reference for the prima-facie referring terms in earlier theories is without foundation.”

  • “[O]n the best-known account of what it means for a theory to be approximately true, it does not follow that an approximately true theory will be explanatorily successful.”

    • E.g. truth content being greater than falsity content, whatever this means.

  • Even if the realist had a semantically adequate characterization of approximate truth, and even if that semantics entailed that most of the consequences of an approximately true theory would be true, she would still be without any criterion that would epistemically warrant the ascription of approximate truth to a theory.

  • Reasons for...

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