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Arguments For and Against Scientific Realism
Edited by Moti Mizrahi (Florida Institute of Technology)
About this topic
| Summary | The scientific realism/antirealism in philosophy of science concerns the epistemic status of our best scientific theories and the ontological status of the theoretical posits of those scientific theories. Scientific realists argue that we have good reasons to believe that our best scientific theories are approximately true (or that the theoretical posits of our best scientific theories exist) because those theories are empirically successful, whereas antirealists argue that the empirical success of our best scientific theories does not warrant belief in the approximate truth (or the existence of the theoretical posits) of our best scientific theories because the history of science is a graveyard of theories that were once successful but were later discarded. The first argument is commonly known as the “miracle argument” or the “no miracles argument” for scientific realism, whereas the second argument is commonly known as the “pessimistic induction” or the “pessimistic meta-induction.” These two arguments have largely dominated the scientific realism/antirealism debate in philosophy of science. However, both realists and antirealists have other arguments in their arsenal. Many of those arguments appeal to the historical of record of science. |
| Key works | The locus classicus of the so-called “miracle argument” is Putnam 1975, whereas the locus classicus of the so-called “pessimistic induction” is Laudan 1981. Psillos 1999 provides a comprehensive defense of scientific realism (see also Leplin 1997 and Sankey 2008), whereas Stanford 2006 provides historical arguments against scientific realism in addition to the pessimistic induction (see also Hesse 1976 and Van Fraassen Bas 1980). More recent discussions of arguments for and against scientific realism include Wray 2018 and Rowbottom 2019. Mizrahi 2020 provides a comprehensive overview of arguments for and against scientific realism. |
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Underdetermination of Theory by Data* (427 | 6)
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- Introduction to the edited volume “Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences”.Kareem Khalifa, Insa Lawler & Elay Shech - 2022 - In Insa Lawler, Kareem Khalifa & Elay Shech (eds.), Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. Routledge.This chapter gives an overview of the various themes and issues discussed in the volume. It includes summaries of all chapters and places the contributions, some of which are part of a critical conversation format, in the context of the larger literature and debates.
- Wenceslao J. Gonzalez: New Approaches to Scientific Realism. [REVIEW]Mahdi Khalili - forthcoming - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie:1-6.This review provides an outline of the collection New Approaches to Scientific Realism, edited by Wenceslao Gonzalez. In particular, it questions whether the contributions to this edition can claim to be novel. The edition includes an introductory chapter and eighteen texts by well-known philosophers, such as Peter Achinstein, Alexander Bird, Donald Gillies, Theo Kuipers, Alan Musgrave, Thomas Nickles, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Howard Sankey, and John Worrall.
- On the Difficulty of the Evolutionary Debunking of Scientific Realism: Graber and Golemon Buttressed.Luke Golemon & Abraham Graber - 2022 - Sophia 61 (3):557-563.In their recent article, Graber and Golemon (_Sophia_ 1–18, 2019 ) argue that any attempted evolutionary debunking of naturalism faces a dilemma. First, in order to be evolutionarily plausible, the skeptical implications must not be too broad. Second, in order to constitute a genuine challenge to scientific realism, the skeptical implications must not be too narrow. Graber and Golemon further develop an evolutionary debunking argument that avoids both horns of this dilemma. De Ray (_Erkenntnis_ 1–21, 2020 ) criticizes Graber and (...)
- Realism and Observation: The View from Generative Grammar.Gabe Dupre - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (3):565-584.Standard proposals of scientific anti-realism assume that the methodology of a scientific research program can be endorsed without accepting its metaphysical commitments. I argue that the distinction between competence, the rules governing one’s language faculty, and performance, or linguistic behavior, precludes this. Linguistic theories aim to describe competence, not performance, and so must be able to distinguish observations reflective of the former from those reflective of the latter. This classification of data makes sense only against the background of a psychologically (...)
- New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress.Yafeng Shan (ed.) - 2022 - New York: Routledge.This collection of original essays offers a comprehensive examination of scientific progress, which has been a central topic in recent debates in philosophy of science. Traditionally, debates over scientific progress have focused on different methodological approaches, notably the epistemic and semantic approaches. The chapters in Part I of the book examine these two traditional approaches, as well as the newly revived functional and newly developed noetic approaches. Part II features in-depth case studies of scientific progress from the history of science. (...)
- Historical Inductions Meet the Material Theory.Elay Shech - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):918-929.Historical inductions, that is, the pessimistic metainduction and the problem of unconceived alternatives, are critically analyzed via John D. Norton’s material theory of induction and subsequently rejected as noncogent arguments. It is suggested that the material theory is amenable to a local version of the pessimistic metainduction, for example, in the context of some medical studies.
- The Literalist Fallacy & the Free Energy Principle: Model building, Scientific Realism and Instrumentalism.Michael David Kirchhoff, Julian Kiverstein & Ian Robertson - manuscriptDisagreement about how best to think of the relation between theories and the realities they represent has a longstanding and venerable history. We take up this debate in relation to the free energy principle (FEP) - a contemporary framework in computational neuroscience, theoretical biology and the philosophy of cognitive science. The FEP is very ambitious, extending from the brain sciences to the biology of self-organisation. In this context, some find apparent discrepancies between the map (the FEP) and the territory (target (...)
- Multiple discoveries, inevitability, and scientific realism.Luca Tambolo & Gustavo Cevolani - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90 (December 2021):30-38.When two or more (groups of) researchers independently investigating the same domain arrive at the same result, a multiple discovery occurs. The pervasiveness of multiple discoveries in science suggests the intuition that they are in some sense inevitable—that one should view them as results that force themselves upon us, so to speak. We argue that, despite the intuitive force of such an “inevitabilist insight,” one should reject it. More specifically, we distinguish two facets of the insight and argue that: (a) (...)
- Embracing Scientific Realism.Seungbae Park - 2022 - Cham: Springer.This book provides philosophers of science with new theoretical resources for making their own contributions to the scientific realism debate. Readers will encounter old and new arguments for and against scientific realism. They will also be given useful tips for how to provide influential formulations of scientific realism and antirealism. Finally, they will see how scientific realism relates to scientific progress, scientific understanding, mathematical realism, and scientific practice.
- The Anti-Metaphysical Argument Against Scientific Realism: A Minimally Metaphysical Response.Raphaël Künstler - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (4):577-595.The anti-metaphysical argument against scientific realism is the following: Knowledge of unobservable entities implies metaphysical knowledge; There is no metaphysical knowledge. Therefore, there is no knowledge of unobservable entities. This argument has strangely received little attention in the profuse literature on scientific realism. This paper claims that the AMA is logically more fundamental than both the pessimistic meta-induction and the underdetermination argument. The second and main claim of this paper is that the instrumentalists’ use of AMA is incoherent. The gist (...)
- The Unvirtuous Prediction of the Pessimistic Induction.Seungbae Park - 2021 - Filozofia 76 (8):581-595.Pessimists predict that future scientific theories will replace present scientific theories. However, they do not specify when the predicted events will take place, so we do not have the chance to blame them for having made a false prediction, although we might have the chance to praise them for having made a true prediction. Their predictions contrast with astronomers’ predictions. Astronomers specify when the next solar eclipse will happen, so we have both the chance to blame them for having made (...)
- Tinbergen’s four questions and the debate between scientific realism and selectionism.Kok Yong Lee - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12643-12661.According to the no-miracle argument, scientific realism is the only view that does not render the predictive success of scientific theories miraculous. Against the no-miracle argument, selectionists argue that the predictive success of scientific theories is a product of them being subject to a selection process that weeds out predictively unsuccessful theories. Against selectionism, I argue that the selectionist explanation is not an alternative to the realist one. More precisely, I draw on a standard framework in behavioral biology, known as (...)
- Objectivity and Underdetermination in Statistical Model Selection.Beckett Sterner & Scott Lidgard - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.The growing range of methods for statistical model selection is inspiring new debates about how to handle the potential for conflicting results when different methods are applied to the same data. While many factors enter into choosing a model selection method, we focus on the implications of disagreements among scientists about whether, and in what sense, the true probability distribution is included in the candidate set of models. While this question can be addressed empirically, the data often provide inconclusive results (...)
- Scientific Realism.Michael Devitt - 2005 - In Patrick Greenough & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Truth and Realism. Clarendon Press.
- Scientific Realism as an Issue in Semantics.Christopher Gauker - 2006 - In Patrick Greenough & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Truth and Realism. Clarendon Press.
- The Relativity of Theory by Moti Mizrahi: Pandemics and Pathogens: What’s at Stake in the Debate Over Scientific Realism? [REVIEW]Margaret Greta Turnbull - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 87 (C):168-169.I provide a critical review of Moti Mizrahi's The Relativity of Theory, expounding on the book's strengths and then providing an extended argument that Mizrahi mischaracterizes the epistemic attitude of concern to antirealism about science as well as the practical stakes involved in adopting the antirealist position.
- Incompatibility and the pessimistic induction: a challenge for selective realism.Florian J. Boge - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-31.Two powerful arguments have famously dominated the realism debate in philosophy of science: The No Miracles Argument (NMA) and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction (PMI). A standard response to the PMI is selective scientific realism (SSR), wherein only the working posits of a theory are considered worthy of doxastic commitment. Building on the recent debate over the NMA and the connections between the NMA and the PMI, I here consider a stronger inductive argument that poses a direct challenge for SSR: Because it (...)
- We Think, They Thought: A Critique of the Pessimistic Meta-Meta Induction.Fahrbach Ludwig - forthcoming - In Lyons Timothy D. & Vickers Peter (eds.), Contemporary Scientific Realism: The Challenge from the History of Science. Oxford University Press. pp. 283-310.Scientific realism, the view that our current successful theories are probably approximately true, is challenged by the pessimistic meta-induction, PMI, according to which many successful theories in the past of science were refuted later on. Realists often respond to the PMI by pointing out that sci-ence has improved a lot since the times of the past refuted theories, and these improvements block the PMI and save realism. Antirealists reply that past realists could have said the same thing, namely that science (...)
- Realism and Empirical Equivalence.Eric Johannesson - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (3):475-495.The main purpose of this paper is to investigate various notions of empirical equivalence in relation to the two main arguments for realism in the philosophy of science, namely the no-miracles argument and the indispensability argument. According to realism, one should believe in the existence of the theoretical entities postulated by empirically adequate theories. According to the no-miracles argument, one should do so because truth is the the best explanation of empirical adequacy. According to the indispensability argument, one should do (...)
- Discussions on physics, metaphysics and metametaphysics: Interpreting quantum mechanics.Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo - 2020 - Dissertation, Federal University of Santa CatarinaThis thesis inquires what it means to interpret non-relativistic quantum mechanics (QM), and the philosophical limits of this interpretation. In pursuit of a scientific-realist stance, a metametaphysical method is expanded and applied to evaluate rival interpretations of QM, based on the conceptual distinction between ontology and metaphysics, for objective theory choice in metaphysical discussions relating to QM. Three cases are examined, in which this metametaphysical method succeeds in indicating what are the wrong alternatives to interpret QM in metaphysical terms. The (...)
- How to save van Fraassen’s own antirealism: a modest proposal.Alessio Gava - 2020 - Perspectiva Filosófica 45 (1):1-21.Bas van Fraassen’s antirealist view of science and its aim, constructive empiricism, notoriously rests upon a distinction between observable and unobservable entities. In order to back his empiricist stance, the Dutch philosopher put forward his own characterization of observability. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that the point of constructive empiricism is not lost if the line is drawn in a somewhat different way from how he draws it. This means that other characterizations of observability can support this antirealist stance, provided they allow (...)
- Replies to Healey’s Comments Regarding van Fraassen’s Positions.Seungbae Park - 2020 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 9 (1):38-47.Healey (2019a) makes four comments on my (Park, 2019a) objections to van Fraassen’s positions. The four comments concern the issues of whether ‘disbelief’ is appropriate or inappropriate to characterize van Fraassen’s position, what the relationship between a theory and models is for van Fraassen, whether he believes or not that a theory is empirically adequate, and whether destructive empiricism is tenable or not. I reply to those comments in this paper.
- Formulational vs. Epistemological Debates Concerning Scientific Realism.Seungbae Park - 2020 - Dialogue 59 (3):479-496.A formulational debate is a debate over whether certain definitions of scientific realism and antirealism are useful or useless. By contrast, an epistemological debate is a debate over whether we have sufficient evidence for scientific realism and antirealism defined in a certain manner. I argue that Hilary Putnam’s definitions of scientific realism and antirealism are more useful than Bas van Fraassen’s definitions of scientific realism and constructive empiricism because Putnam’s definitions can generate both formulational and epistemological debates, whereas van Fraassen’s (...)
- A cognitive perspective on scientific realism.Michael Vlerick - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (8):1157-1178.The debate about scientific realism is concerned with the relation between our scientific theories and the world. Scientific realists argue that our best theories or components of those theories correspond to the world. Anti-realists deny such a correspondence. Traditionally, this central issue in the philosophy of science has been approached by focusing on the theories themselves (e.g., by looking at theory change or the underlying experimental context). I propose a relatively unexplored way to approach this old debate. In addition to (...)
- Kusch and van Fraassen on microscopic experience.Alessio Gava - 2019 - Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia 45 (1):7-31.Martin Kusch has recently defended Bas van Fraassen’s controversial view on microscopes, according to which these devices are not ‘windows on an invisible world’, but rather ‘image generators’. The two authors also claim that, since in a microscopic detection it is not possible to empirically investigate the geometrical relations between all the elements involved, one is entitled to maintain an agnostic stance about the reality of the entity allegedly represented by the produced image. In this paper I argue that, contrary (...)
- How to Formulate Scientific Realism and Antirealism.Seungbae Park - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (4):477–488.The wider the gap between rivaling positions, the more there can be debates between rivaling interlocutors. The gap between the respective formulations of scientific realism and antirealism that invoke the Prussian conception of rationality is wider than the gap between the respective formulations of scientific realism and antirealism that invoke the English conception of rationality. Therefore, scientific realists and antirealists should choose the former over the latter as the framework of their debate.
- Critiques of Axiological Realism and Surrealism.Seungbae Park - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (1):61-74.Lyons’s (2003, 2018) axiological realism holds that science pursues true theories. I object that despite its name, it is a variant of scientific antirealism, and is susceptible to all the problems with scientific antirealism. Lyons (2003, 2018) also advances a variant of surrealism as an alternative to the realist explanation for success. I object that it does not give rise to understanding because it is an ad hoc explanans and because it gives a conditional explanation. Lyons might use axiological realism (...)
- Bayesian Philosophy of Science: Variations on a Theme by the Reverend Thomas Bayes.Jan Sprenger & Stephan Hartmann - 2019 - Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann offer a fresh approach to central topics in philosophy of science, including causation, explanation, evidence, and scientific models. Their Bayesian approach uses the concept of degrees of belief to explain and to elucidate manifold aspects of scientific reasoning.
- Juha Saatsi, ed., "The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism.". [REVIEW]Jan Arreman - 2019 - Philosophy in Review 39 (2):103-104.Review of The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism by Juha Saatsi (ed.).
- An Examination of Some Aspects of Howard Stein's Work.Chris Mitsch - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 66:1-13.Some understand Stein’s “Yes, but…” as an entry in the realism—instrumentalism debate (RID) itself, albeit one dissatisfied with then-extant positions. In this paper, however, I argue the opposite: Stein’s conception of science and his approach to its history and philosophy actually preclude the RID. First, I characterize Stein as persistently attending to his own historical and philosophical methods. I then describe his conception of science as both a dialectic and an enterprise, and I draw from this conception several conclusions about (...)
- How to Overcome Antirealists’ Objections to Scientific Realism.Seungbae Park - 2020 - Axiomathes 30 (1):1-12.Van Fraassen contends that there is no argument that rationally compels us to disbelieve a successful theory, T. I object that this contention places upon him the burden of showing that scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments, such as the pessimistic induction, do not rationally compel us to disbelieve T. Van Fraassen uses the English view of rationality to rationally disbelieve T. I argue that realists can use it to rationally believe T, despite scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments against T.
- On Mizrahi’s Argument Against Stanford’s Instrumentalism.Fabio Sterpetti - 2019 - Axiomathes 29 (2):103-125.Mizrahi’s argument against Stanford’s challenge to scientific realism is analyzed. Mizrahi’s argument is worth of attention for at least two reasons: unlike other criticisms that have been made to Stanford’s view so far, Mizrahi’s argument does not question any specific claim of Stanford’s argument, rather it puts into question the very coherence of Stanford’s position, because it argues that since Stanford’s argument rests on the problem of the unconceived alternatives, Stanford’s argument is self-defeating. Thus, if Mizrahi’s argument is effective in (...)
- Scientific Realism as the Most Reasonable choice?Federica Isabella Malfatti - 2018 - Isonomia: Online Philosophical Journal of the University of Urbino 1:1-17.Scientific realism, roughly, is the view that successful scientific theories are (at least partially or approximately) true. Is this the most reasonable stance to assume towards science? The no-miracle argument says it is: the stunning empirical success of our scientific theories is in need of an explanation, and (partial or approximate) truth seems to be the best explanation that we have at hand. The aim of this paper is to briefly reconstruct the trajectory of the success–to–truth inference, to critically analyse (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - On the No Miracle Argument.Alejandro Victor Thiry - 2018 - Aporia 28 (2):1-9.The dispute between scientific realism and anti-realism is one of the most exciting topics in the current general philosophy of science. In the debate, the anti-realists attack their opponents with two main arguments, the pessimistic induction and the underdetermination of theories by all possible data. The realists, on the other hand, defend their position through the famous no miracle argument, which seems to be their most important standpoint. In this paper, I will expose two reconstructions of this argument and will (...)
- Explaining Science's Success, by John Wright: Understanding How Scientific Knowledge Works, Durham: Acumen, 2013, pp. 256, £40.00. [REVIEW]K. Brad Wray - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (4):833-834.This is a book review of Wright's Explaining Science's Success.
- The Coincidentalist Reply to the No-Miracles Argument.Kenneth Boyce - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (5):929-946.Proponents of the no-miracles argument contend that scientific realism is “the only philosophy that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle.” Bas van Fraassen argued, however, that the success of our best theories can be explained in Darwinian terms—by the fact they are survivors of a winnowing process in which unsuccessful theories are rejected. Critics of this selectionist explanation complain that while it may account for the fact we have chosen successful theories, it does not explain why any particular (...)
- Explanatory Virtues are Indicative of Truth.Kevin McCain - 2018 - Logos and Episteme 9 (1):63-73.In a recent issue of this journal, Miloud Belkoniene challenges explanationist accounts of evidential support in two ways. First, he alleges that there are cases that show explanatory virtues are not linked to the truth of hypotheses. Second, he maintains that attempts to show that explanatoriness is relevant to evidential support because it adds to the resiliency (stability) of probability functions fail. I contest both of Belkoniene’s claims.
- How Deployment Realism withstands Doppelt's Criticisms.Mario Alai - 2018 - Spontaneous Generations 9 (1):122-135.Gerald Doppelt claims that Deployment Realism cannot withstand the antirealist objections based on the “pessimistic meta-induction” and Laudan’s historical counterexamples. Moreover it is incomplete, as it purports to explain the predictive success of theories, but overlooks the necessity to explain also their explanatory success. Accordingly, he proposes a new version of realism, presented as the best explanation of both predictive and explanatory success, and committed only to the truth of best current theories, not of the discarded ones. Elsewhere I criticized (...)
- A pragmatic, existentialist approach to the scientific realism debate.Curtis Forbes - 2017 - Synthese 194 (9):3327-3346.It has become apparent that the debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists has come to a stalemate. Neither view can reasonably claim to be the most rational philosophy of science, exclusively capable of making sense of all scientific activities. On one prominent analysis of the situation, whether we accept a realist or an anti-realist account of science actually seems to depend on which values we antecedently accept, rather than our commitment to “rationality” per se. Accordingly, several philosophers have attempted (...)
- Theoretical Virtues in Science: Uncovering Reality Through Theory.Samuel Schindler - 2018 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.What are the features of a good scientific theory? Samuel Schindler's book revisits this classical question in the philosophy of science and develops new answers to it. Theoretical virtues matter not only for choosing theories 'to work with', but also for what we are justified in believing: only if the theories we possess are good ones can we be confident that our theories' claims about nature are actually correct. Recent debates have focussed rather narrowly on a theory's capacity to predict (...)
- What would it Mean to Directly Observe Electrons?David Mitsuo Nixon - 2004 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 8 (1):1–18.In this paper it is argued that a proper understanding of the justification of perceptual beliefs leaves open the possibility that normal humans, unaided by microscopes, could genuinely know, by direct observation, of the existence of a theoretical entity like an electron. A particular theory of justification called perceptual responsibilism is presented. If successful, this kind of view would undercut one line of argument that has been given (for example, by Bas van Fraassen) in support of scientific anti-realism. Various objections (...)
- Scientific realism: what it is, the contemporary debate, and new directions.Darrell P. Rowbottom - 2019 - Synthese 196 (2):451-484.First, I answer the controversial question ’What is scientific realism?’ with extensive reference to the varied accounts of the position in the literature. Second, I provide an overview of the key developments in the debate concerning scientific realism over the past decade. Third, I provide a summary of the other contributions to this special issue.
- Explaining science's success: Understanding how scientific knowledge works by John Wright.Jarrett Leplin - 2014 - Analysis 74 (1):184-185.
- Could Theoretical Entities Save Realism?Mohamed Elsamahi - 1994 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994:173-180.Hacking and other entity realists suggest a strategy to build scientific realism on a stronger foundation than inference to the best explanation. They argue that if beliefs in the existence of theoretical entities are derived from experimentation rather than theories, they can escape the antirealist's criticism and provide a stronger ground for realism. In this paper, an outline and a critique of entity realism are presented. It will be argued that entity realism cannot stand as a separate position from classical (...)
- John Wright, Explaining Science's Success. Understanding How Scientific Knowledge Works, Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2013, 199 pp., GBP 45 (US $75) (Hardcover), ISBN 978‐1‐84465‐532‐8. [REVIEW]Matthias Egg - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (3):367-372.
- Ontic realism and scientific explanation.Michael Bradie - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (3):321.Wesley Salmon defends an ontic realism that distinguishes explanatory from descriptive knowledge. Explanatory knowledge makes appeals to (unobservable) theoretical acausal mechanisms. Salmon presents an argument designed both to legitimize attributing truth values to theoretical claims and to justify treating theoretical claims as descriptions. The argument succeeds but only at the price of calling the distinction between explanation and description into question. Even if Salmon's attempts to distinguish causal mechanisms from other mechanisms are successful, the assumed centrality of the appeal to (...)
- How many sciences for one world? Contingency and the success of science.Emiliano Trizio - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (2):253-258.Contingentism is the claim that the history of a particular field of science could have taken a different route from the actual one, and that the resulting imaginary science could have been both as successful as the real one and, in a non-trivial way, incompatible with it. Inevitabilism consists in the denial of this claim. In this paper, I try both to give a clear content to contingentism, especially in the field of physics, and to argue for its plausibility, while (...)
- Detecting extrasolar planets.Peter Kosso - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 37 (2):224-236.The detection of extrasolar planets presents a good case in which to clarify the distinction between observation and inference from evidence. By asking whether these planets have been observed or inferred from evidence, and by using the scientific details to answer the question, we will get a clearer understanding of the epistemic difference between these two forms of information. The issue of scientific realism pivots on this distinction, and the results of this case will help to articulate the epistemically important (...)
- What is right with the miracle argument: Establishing a taxonomy of natural kinds.Martin Carrier - 1993 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 24 (3):391-409.
- Evident atoms: visuality in Jean Perrin’s Brownian motion research.Charlotte Bigg - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (3):312-322.The issue of shifting scales between the microscopic and the macroscopic dimensions is a recurrent one in the history of science, and in particular the history of microscopy. But it took on new dimensions in the context of early twentieth-century microscophysics, with the progressive realisation that the physical laws governing the macroscopic world were not always adequate for describing the sub-microscopic one. The paper focuses on the researches of Jean Perrin in the 1900s, in particular his use of Brownian motion (...)
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