The Relativity of Theory: Key Positions and Arguments in the Contemporary Scientific Realism/Antirealism Debate

Cham, Switzerland: Springer (2020)
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Abstract

This book offers a close and rigorous examination of the arguments for and against scientific realism and introduces key positions in the scientific realism/antirealism debate, which is one of the central debates in contemporary philosophy of science. On the one hand, scientific realists argue that we have good reasons to believe that our best scientific theories are approximately true because, if they were not even approximately true, they would not be able to explain and predict natural phenomena with such impressive accuracy. On the other hand, antirealists argue that the success of science does not warrant belief in the approximate truth of our best scientific theories. This is because the history of science is a graveyard of theories that were once successful but were later discarded. The author eventually settles on a middle ground position between scientific realism and antirealism called "relative realism."

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Moti Mizrahi
Florida Institute of Technology

Citations of this work

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Taking models seriously and being a linguistic realist.Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Gilson Olegario da Silva - 2022 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 26 (1):73-94.
What Is the Basic Unit of Scientific Progress? A Quantitative, Corpus-Based Study.Moti Mizrahi - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (4):441-458.
Why Park’s Argument from Double Spaces is Not a Problem for Relative Realism.Moti Mizrahi - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (6):58-62.

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