Abstract
In this chapter, we provide an analysis of Torretti’s main views in the general philosophy of science. I shall examine his Kantian take on objectivity (Sect. 2.2), the creative understanding thesis (Sect. 2.3), his critique of scientific realism (Sect. 2.4), his elaboration of mathematical fictionalism (Sect. 2.5), his analysis of physical laws (Sect. 2.6), and his examination of the contribution of philosophical reflection to scientific progress (Sect. 2.7). For this, I will consider Torretti’s publications from the late 1960s to the early 2010s in the hope of expounding some of his ideas that may not be well known to some of his readers coming exclusively from either the history and philosophy of physics and geometry, or from the history of philosophy. With this, we fill a gap in our understanding of Torretti’s views in various fields in the philosophy of science, assessing their motivations and arguing that they yield an attractive alternative for various issues in current debates.
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Notes
- 1.
Spanish-speaking readers will be delighted to know that Torretti’s (2008a) “Objectivity: A Kantian Perspective”, which appears as chapter 4 in Massimi, Ed., (2008, 81–95), Kant and Philosophy of Science Today, was later on translated into Spanish as “La objetividad en el sentido de Kant” (Torretti, 2010, 13–32).
- 2.
Those who are familiar with Peirce’s early elaborations of pragmatism, which recognize the role of scientific communities in the fixation of beliefs about the world, and Putnam’s rejection of the scientific realist’s pretension to achieve a God’s eye point of view, will readily note their influence on Torretti’s views. An additional, late influence is Hasok Chang’s elaboration of pluralism and pragmatism in The Invention of Temperature (2004), which stirred up Torretti’s most recent investigation on philosophy’s contribution to scientific progress. See Sect. 2.7 below.
- 3.
This manuscript from 2014 was originally written in Spanish, and no English translation is available as of now (2023). The manuscript is particularly relevant since it yields a substantive account of Torretti’s views on the philosophy of mathematics, especially concerning problems about the ontological status of mathematical posits. I shall translate a few passages in the remainder of this section.
- 4.
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Soto, C. (2023). Roberto Torretti’s Philosophy of Science. In: Soto, C. (eds) Current Debates in Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library, vol 477. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32375-1_2
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