Science

What is SCIENTIFIC REALISM? What does SCIENTIFIC REALISM mean? SCIENTIFIC REALISM meaning

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• published: 29 Sep 2016
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What is SCIENTIFIC REALISM? What does SCIENTIFIC REALISM mean? SCIENTIFIC REALISM meaning & explanation. Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world as it is, independent of what it might be taken to be. Within philosophy of science, it is often framed as an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The debate over the success of science in this context centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories. Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables, as opposed to instrumentalism. Scientific realism involves the two basic positions. First, it is a set of claims about the features of an ideal scientific theory; an ideal theory is the sort of theory science aims to produce. Second, it is the commitment that science will eventually produce theories very much like an ideal theory and that science has done pretty well thus far in some domains. It is important to note that one might be a scientific realist regarding some sciences while not being a realist regarding others. For example, one might hold realist attitudes toward physics, chemistry and biology, and not toward economics, psychology and sociology. According to scientific realism, an ideal scientific theory has the following features: - The claims the theory makes are either true or false, depending on whether the entities talked about by the theory exist and are correctly described by the theory. This is the semantic commitment of scientific realism. - The entities described by the scientific theory exist objectively and mind-independently. This is the metaphysical commitment of scientific realism. - There are reasons to believe some significant portion of what the theory says. This is the epistemological commitment. Combining the first and the second claim entails that an ideal scientific theory says definite things about genuinely existing entities. The third claim says that we have reasons to believe that many scientific claims about these entities are true. Scientific realism usually holds that science makes progress, i.e. scientific theories usually get successively better, or, rather, answer more and more questions. For this reason, many people, scientific realist or otherwise, hold that realism should make sense of the progress of science in terms of theories being successively more like the ideal theory that scientific realists describe. The following claims are typical of those held by scientific realists. Due to the wide disagreements over the nature of science's success and the role of realism in its success, a scientific realist would agree with some but not all of the following positions. - The best scientific theories are at least partially true. - The best theories do not employ central terms that are non referring expressions. - To say that a theory is approximately true is sufficient explanation of the degree of its predictive success. - The approximate truth of a theory is the only explanation of its predictive success. - Even if a theory employs expressions that do not have a reference, a scientific theory may be approximately true. - Scientific theories are in a historical process of progress towards a true account of the physical world. - Scientific theories make genuine, existential claims. - Theoretical claims of scientific theories should be read literally and are definitively either true or false. - The degree of the predictive success of a theory is evidence of the referential success of its central terms. - The goal of science is an account of the physical world that is literally true. Science has been successful because this is the goal that it has been making progress towards. One of the main arguments for scientific realism centers on the notion that scientific knowledge is progressive in nature, and that it is able to predict phenomena successfully. Many realists (e.g., Ernan McMullin, Richard Boyd) think the operational success of a theory lends credence to the idea that its more unobservable aspects exist, because they were how the theory reasoned its predictions. For example, a scientific realist would argue that science must derive some ontological support for atoms from the outstanding phenomenological success of all the theories using them.