Abstract
In August 2014 the Universities of Pretoria and Johannesburg hosted a major international conference in Cape Town, ‘New Thinking about Scientific Realism’, to assess extant discussions of the view in hopes of opening up new avenues of research, and to sow the seeds of further development and consideration of these prospective lines of inquiry. In this, the concluding essay of the Special Issue collecting some of the descendants of these earlier presentations, I extract some of the more striking themes to emerge with the aim of reflecting on their novelty and their promise for the future study of scientific realism.
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Notes
For an analogous consideration of how prospectively applicable criteria of success or failure may function to render a form of realism substantive, see David Spurrett’s discussion (2015) of materialism or physicalism–a thesis or theses often linked to discussions of scientific realism.
For some thoughts, see (Chakravartty 2007), chapter 8, and (2017), chapter 6. It is not sufficient, of course, to jump from the falsity of idealizations (this is definitional) to the absence of approximate truth. Since anything that is merely approximately true is understood to be false, significantly more is required.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deep thanks to Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, who chaired the Program Committee for Cape Town and invited me to join in, and to extend this gratitude to co-conspirators Alex Broadbent and H. P. P. (Hennie) Lötter for an inspiring event and some amazingly generous hospitality during and afterward.
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Chakravartty, A. Reflections on new thinking about scientific realism. Synthese 194, 3379–3392 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1514-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1514-9