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How to Overcome Antirealists’ Objections to Scientific Realism

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Abstract

Van Fraassen contends that there is no argument that rationally compels us to disbelieve a successful theory, T. I object that this contention places upon him the burden of showing that scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments, such as the pessimistic induction, do not rationally compel us to disbelieve T. Van Fraassen uses the English view of rationality to rationally disbelieve T. I argue that realists can use it to rationally believe T, despite scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments against T.

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Notes

  1. See Park (2014) for the discussion of the non-realist explanations.

  2. See Park (2018b: 11) for an overview of the realist objections to the pessimistic induction.

  3. See Hempel (1966: 3–6) for such an example.

  4. I thank a reviewer for this sharp criticism.

  5. I thank another reviewer for these questions.

  6. I thank the second reviewer for these questions.

  7. Several problems with merely accepting T are summarized in Park (2018b).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018S1A5A2A01039606).

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  1. Division of General Studies, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Ulju-gun, Ulsan, 44919, Republic of Korea

    Seungbae Park

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Correspondence to Seungbae Park.

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Park, S. How to Overcome Antirealists’ Objections to Scientific Realism. Axiomathes 30, 1–12 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-019-09432-3

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