Realism in the Desert and in the Jungle: Reply to French, Ghins, and Psillos
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Realism in the Desert and in the Jungle: Reply to French, Ghins, and Psillos Anjan Chakravartty
Received: 15 November 2012 / Accepted: 15 November 2012 / Published online: 4 December 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012
Abstract A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable has two primary aims. The first is to extract the most promising refinements of the idea of scientific realism to emerge in recent decades and assemble them into a maximally defensible realist position, semirealism. The second is to demonstrate that, contra antirealist scepticism to the contrary, key concepts typically invoked by realists in expounding their views can be given a coherent and unified explication. These concepts include notions of causation, laws of nature, scientific kinds, and approximate truth, and consequently, the demonstration undertaken includes a metaphysical study of ideas more commonly employed unreflectively in epistemological assessments of the sciences. In this paper, I answer searching critiques of this project by Steven French, Michel Ghins, and Stathis Psillos.
1 Introduction: Semirealism Scientific realism is an epistemic attitude towards the sciences, which takes the content of our best scientific theories to furnish knowledge of both observable and unobservable aspects of the natural world. This attitude has been the subject of a great deal of elaboration in recent philosophical history, punctuated by a surge of attention three decades ago following the demise of logical empiricism and the historical turn in the philosophy of science. This elaboration was and continues to be necessary, for the plausibility of the schematic characterization of realism given above is difficult to assess otherwise. One might wonder, for example, how one should determine which theories are our best, or what scientific knowledge amounts A. Chakravartty (&) Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, 100 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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to given the fact of theory change over time and the widespread use of idealizations in theories and models. In a recent book (Chakravartty 2007, ‘MFSR’ henceforth), I sought to do two things, the first of which was to identify the most promising aspects of recent elaborations of scientific realism and fuse them together. I called the resulting position ‘semirealism’, in recognition of the fact that sophisticated, contemporary forms of realist commitment are characteristically and appropriately modest or measured, not least so as to survive pressing antirealist arguments that might otherwise skewer more naı¨ve formulations of realism. In particular, I argued that attempts to refine realism by directing a positive epistemic attitude towards selective parts of our best theories—parts that most merit it—have taken important steps forward in rendering realism plausible. Positions such as entity realism and structural realism are selectively pessimistic about parts of theories they identify as least de
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