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Whence Ontological Structural Realism?

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EPSA Epistemology and Methodology of Science

Abstract

I scrutinize (a) the alleged dichotomy between epistemic and ontological forms of structural realism, and (b) the considerations used to motivate the ontic variety over the epistemic. I argue that there’s nothing in the traditional realism debate that calls for ontological structural realism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    :̧def :̧def Ladyman (1998), French and Ladyman (2003) and French and Rickles (2003) defend this premise particularly for quantum particles and quantum fields, and tentatively point towards the nature of spacetime. Pooley (2006) dissents, especially regarding the underdetermined status of spacetime points. See also Redhead and Teller (1992) and Saunders (2003b) for criticism of the underdetermination thesis, and French and Krause (2006) for further defence.

  2. 2.

    French and Ladyman read Psillos (1999), for example, as an advocate of standard realism thus characterised. French (2006) has called this ‘object oriented’ realism.

  3. 3.

    The realist explanation of this success actually is independent of the existence or otherwise of spacetime points altogether, as corresponding to points of the mathematical manifold of a GTR model. The realist can remain agnostic of the ‘fine-structure’ of spacetime at the Planck-scale, only maintaining that the coarse-grained macrofeatures that emerge from the ultimate quantum theory of gravity are correctly described by GTR.

  4. 4.

    Ladyman and Ross (2007) perhaps also argue for this claim, having shifted away from the argument from metaphysical underdetermination.

  5. 5.

    It has been suggested that the individuals and non-individuals packages could be viewed as different representations of the common ‘structuralist core’ but this intuition must be substantiated in order to show how the underdetermined options go over and above the common core, instead of just being metaphysical alternatives.

  6. 6.

    It is not always easy to prise apart the different motivations running in parallel, but in my view an illegitimately close connection between different structuralist motivations is implied in Ladyman (1998), French and Ladyman (2003), Saunders (2003b), Lyre (2004), and French (2006), for example.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Steven French and Angelo Cei for helpful correspondence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    Juha Saatsi

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  1. Juha Saatsi
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Correspondence to Juha Saatsi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fac. Filosofía, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Planta Sótano, Edificio B, Madrid, 28040, Spain

    Mauricio Suárez

  2. Dipto. Filosofia, Universita di Roma, Tre, Via Ostiense 234, Roma, 00144, Italy

    Mauro Dorato

  3. Political Science, London School of Economics &, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom

    Miklós Rédei

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Saatsi, J. (2009). Whence Ontological Structural Realism?. In: Suárez, M., Dorato, M., Rédei, M. (eds) EPSA Epistemology and Methodology of Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3263-8_22

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