Realism, reference & perspective
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(2020) 10:38
PAPER IN GENERAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Realism, reference & perspective Carl Hoefer 1,2
& Genoveva
Martí 1,2
Received: 31 October 2019 / Accepted: 17 August 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper continues the defense of a version of scientific realism, Tautological Scientific Realism (TSR), that rests on the claim that, excluding some areas of fundamental physics about which doubts are entirely justified, many areas of contemporary science cannot be coherently imagined to be false other than via postulation of radically skeptical scenarios, which are not relevant to the realism debate in philosophy of science. In this paper we discuss, specifically, the threats of meaning change and reference failure associated with the Kuhnian tradition, which depend on a descriptivist approach to meaning, and we argue that descriptivism is not the right account of the meaning and reference of theoretical terms. We suggest that an account along the lines of the causal-historical theory of reference provides a more faithful picture of how terms for unobservable theoretical entities and properties come to refer; we argue that this picture works particularly well for TSR. In the last section we discuss how our account raises concerns specifically for perspectival forms of scientific realism. Keywords Realism . Scientific realism . Reference . Theoretical entities . Unobservable
entities . Reference to unobservable entities . Descriptivism . Direct reference . Causalhistorical account of reference . Holism . Anti-realism
1 Introduction The purpose of this paper is to continue the defense of a novel form of scientific realism, first sketched in Hoefer (2020). Tentatively called “Tautological Scientific Realism” (TSR), the core ideas of this view are the following. (i) Scientific realism This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Perspectivism in science: metaphysical and epistemological reflections Guest Editor: Michela Massimi
* Carl Hoefer [email protected]
1
ICREA, Pg. Lluís Companys 23, 08010 Barcelona, Spain
2
Department of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
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should exclude fundamental physics theories from its scope. (ii) The dramatic leap forward in many of the sciences in the twentieth century justifies a realist stance for many parts of science. By contrast, despite all the wonderful episodes contained therein, the history of science before the twentieth century is no place to try to extend or defend the claims of scientific realism (SR). (iii) Many areas of contemporary science have attained such a level of interconnection (between different domains of knowledge) and such a variety of sources of confirmation that it is now simply no longer possible to coherently doubt the approximate truth of the core “lore” in those areas, without doing so by means of one or another radical-skeptical scenario.1 And we believe it is almost tautological to maintain that if you ha
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