Abstract
Motivated by the developments in contemporary mathematical physics and the related interpretive and historiographical works on these developments, a structuralist and historically constitutive and constructive approach to scientific realism (SHASR) is proposed to address the challenges Thomas Kuhn raised against scientific realism, and to remove the defects of the currently available dissatisfactory responses the structuralists put forward to the challenges. The paper shows that SHASR productively exploits the insights from both Kuhn’s historicism and his critics’ structuralism, while avoids the traps in both traditions. Then, after a brief comparison between SHASR and the increasingly popular neo-Kantian post-Kuhnian philosophy of science recommended and defended by Michael Freedman and some others, it concludes with a big picture about the science-world relationship derived from the notion of emergence conceptualized within the framework of SHASR, whose bearings on the Kantian question of the phenomenal - noumenal relationship are worth further explorations.
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Notes
- 1.
How a CF is historically constituted will be addressed below, although Kuhn himself did not have proper conceptual resources to address it.
- 2.
This implication is explored in details in Cao (2010).
- 3.
For a detailed discussion of the important roles of FE in theoretical physics, see Sect. 9.1 of (Cao 2010).
- 4.
It goes without saying that the whole discussion above remains within the discourse of structuralism because the notion of the electron as a kind of entity is completely formulated in structural terms: the notions of mass and charge are (and can only be) defined in relational and structural terms: no entity would have any mass if it exists lonely in the world in which no other masses exist and thus no gravitational relations with other masses exist; the same can be said to the notion of charge.
- 5.
- 6.
Cf. Simons (1994).
- 7.
In the sense of context-insensitive, not of existing lonely without connecting to others.
- 8.
- 9.
In the new configuration associated with the new entity (with new and different essence, thus a different entity from the old one) constituted thereby, the retained structural features from the old configuration retain their constitutive roles in the new context, as the extended notion of GE mentioned above suggests, although their places (at the core or periphery) and functions (identifying-features-placing or not) have changed.
- 10.
In an important sense, the classical electron in Thompson’s theory and the quantum electron in Dirac’s theory are different entities. In an even deeper sense, however, they, as manifestation of two different aspects at two different levels of the same electron in the causal-hierarchical structure of the noumenal world, refer to the same entity, or more precisely, refer to different aspects at different levels of the same noumenal electron. Thus realism defined in SHASR is not the naïve realism about unobservable entities or properties or mechanism, etc., but the realism of various manifestations of the causal-hierarchical structure of the noumenal world.
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Cao, T.Y. (2018). Scientific Realism in the Post-Kuhnian Times. In: Wuppuluri, S., Doria, F. (eds) The Map and the Territory. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72478-2_6
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