Empirical Success or Explanatory Success: What Does Current Scientific Realism Need to Explain?

The No Miracles Argument (NMA) is perhaps the most prominent argument in the debate about scientific realism. It contends that the truth of our best scientific theories is the only hypothesis that does not make the astonishing predictive and explanatory success of science a mystery. However, the argument has been criticized from a Bayesian point of view as committing the base rate fallacy. We provide two Bayesian models (one related to the individual-theory-based NMA and one related to the frequency-based NMA) that respond to that objection. The first model takes into account the observed stability of mature scientific theories, the second the success frequency of theories within a scientific discipline. We conclude that the NMA can be used to defend the realist thesis and that its validity is a highly context-sensitive matter.

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Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind

10.1017/cbo9780511625435 ◽

1979 ◽

Cited By ~ 601

Author(s):

Paul M. Churchland

Keyword(s):

Scientific Realism

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THE CONCEPT OF ENTROPY AND ONTIC SCIENTIFIC REALISM

Философия науки ◽

10.15372/ps20200206 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Scientific Realism

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Background Practices

10.1093/oso/9780198796220.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Hubert L. Dreyfus

Keyword(s):

Scientific Realism ◽

Distinctive Feature ◽

Phenomenological Description ◽

Existential Philosophy ◽

Textual Exegesis ◽

European Tradition ◽

Continental Divide ◽

European Philosophy ◽

Anglophone World ◽

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus is one of the foremost advocates of European philosophy in the anglophone world. His clear, jargon-free interpretations of the leading thinkers of the European tradition of philosophy have done a great deal to erase the analytic–Continental divide. But Dreyfus is not just an influential interpreter of Continental philosophers; he is a creative, iconoclastic thinker in his own right. Drawing on the work of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Kierkegaard, Dreyfus makes significant contributions to contemporary conversations about mind, authenticity, technology, nihilism, modernity and postmodernity, art, scientific realism, and religion. This volume collects thirteen of Dreyfus’s most influential essays, each of which interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in phenomenological and existential philosophy. The essays exemplify a distinctive feature of his approach to philosophy, namely the way his work inextricably intertwines the interpretation of texts with his own analysis and description of the phenomena at issue. In fact, these two tasks—textual exegesis and phenomenological description—are for Dreyfus necessarily dependent on each other. In approaching philosophy in this way, Dreyfus is an heir to Heidegger’s own historically oriented style of phenomenology.

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198802099.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Daniel Stoljar

Keyword(s):

Scientific Realism ◽

Subject Matter ◽

Main Thesis ◽

The Subject

This chapter introduces the main thesis of the book, reasonable optimism, according to which there is progress on reasonably many of the big problems of philosophy. It also introduces two distinctions central to that thesis: between big questions in philosophy and small questions, and between the subject matter of philosophy, and the big questions that people have asked in different times and places about that subject matter. Examples of professional philosophers who endorse either pessimism or something close to it are set forth and analysed. Scientific realism, a position often associated with reasonable optimism about history or science, is also introduced.

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Scientific realism, or the risks of importing research models into psychology

Theory & Psychology ◽

10.1177/09593543211006777 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 429-432

Author(s):

David Carré

Keyword(s):

Standard Model ◽

Scientific Realism ◽

Subject Matter ◽

Human Person ◽

Behavioral Research ◽

Research Practice ◽

Philosophical Basis ◽

The Standard Model

In “Scientific Realism and the Issue of Variability in Behavior,” Arocha (2021) develops an acute critique of “the standard model of current research practice in psychology” (p. 376), sharply dissecting five unwarranted assumptions behind it. To address these issues, the author proposes adopting a nonpositivist philosophical basis for behavioral research: scientific realism. Behind this argumentation, however, it is implied that scientific realism is fit for becoming the metatheoretical framework for psychology because it addresses the shortcomings of the current positivist model. In this commentary, I argue that scientific realism is not fit for becoming that philosophical basis, because it is open to reducing the discipline’s subject matter—the human person—to make it fit with models that have been fruitful in other sciences. Three historical examples are presented to show the risks of adopting models from disciplines devoted to explaining other phenomena to tackle the complexity of psychology’s subject matter.

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Scientific Ontology: Fact or Stance?

Dialogue ◽

10.1017/s0012217320000360 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 60 (1) ◽

pp. 15-31 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Stathis Psillos

Keyword(s):

Scientific Realism ◽

Epistemic Stance ◽

Realism Debate ◽

Scientific Ontology

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the key tenets of Anjan Chakravartty's book Scientific Ontology are critically discussed. After a brief presentation of the project of stance-based ontology (Section 2), I move on to criticize Chakravartty's account of metaphysical inference (Sections 2 and 3). Then, in Section 4, I take issue with Chakravartty's view that fundamental debates in metaphysics inevitably lead to irresolvable disagreement, while in Section 5, the concept of epistemic stance is scrutinized, noting that there are problems in Chakravartty's account of the rationality of stance-choice. Finally, Section 6 is about the implications of stance-based ontology for the scientific realism debate.

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