Unnatural Attitudes: Realist and Antirealist Attachments to Science

This is a commissioned state-Of-The-Art article on the realism debate. Realist positions reviewed include general and entity realism. Instrumentalist positions include constructive empiricism and quasi-Realism. Metatheorems are demonstrated to show…

Kuhn is much more an antirealist than a realist, the earlier and later articulations of realist and antirealist ingredients in his views merit close scrutiny. What are the constituents of the real invariant world posited by Kuhn and its relation to…

Scientific realists have argued that the truth (likeness) of our theories provides the only explanation for the success of science. I consider alternative explanations proposed by antirealists. I endorse Leplin's contention that neither van…

I develop an account of predictive similarity that allows even antirealists who accept a correspondence conception of truth to answer the realist demand (recently given sophisticated reformulations by Musgrave and Leplin) to explain the success of…

Within the last ten years, there have been international concerns about school science education, in particular in many rich, highly developed countries where there is a decline in the recruitment of students to science and technology. These…

Now acknowledged as a classic in the philosophy of science, A Realist Theory of Science is one of the very few books which has transformed, not only our understanding of science, but that of the nature of the world it studies. Since its original…

This paper examines Florence Nightingale's realist philosophy of science by comparing it to the contemporaneously dominant philosophy of positivism. It starts by adumbrating the tenets of positivism and continues by assessing the degree to which…

Marc Alspector-Kelly claims that Bas van Fraassen's primary challenge to the scientific realist is for the realist to find a way to justify the use of some mode of inference that takes him from the world of observables to knowledge of the world of…

Notes from a lecture on "Science" given to GSTR332 Natural Science, Berea College

In this paper I address some of the problems that the historical development of science poses for a realist and discuss whether a realist construal of scientific activity is conducive to historiographical practice. First, I discuss, by means of…