Scientific Realism

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011)
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Abstract

Debates about scientific realism are closely connected to almost everything else in the philosophy of science, for they concern the very nature of scientific knowledge. Scientific realism is a positive epistemic attitude toward the content of our best theories and models, recommending belief in both observable and unobservable aspects of the world described by the sciences. This epistemic attitude has important metaphysical and semantic dimensions, and these various commitments are contested by a number of rival epistemologies of science, known collectively as forms of scientific antirealism. This article explains what scientific realism is, outlines its main variants, considers the most common arguments for and against the position, and contrasts it with its most important antirealist counterparts.

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reprint Chakravartty, Anjan (2012) "Scientific Realism". In Zalta, Ed, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, pp. : Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2012)

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Anjan Chakravartty
University of Miami

Citations of this work

Scientific progress: Four accounts.Finnur Dellsén - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (11):e12525.
Cosmological Realism.David Merritt - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):193-208.
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

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