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(Structural) realism and its representational vehicles

  • S.I.: New Thinking about Scientific Realism
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Abstract

In this essay I shall focus on the adoption of the Semantic Approach by structural realists, including myself, who have done so on the grounds that it wears its structuralist sympathies on its sleeve (Ladyman Stud Hist Philos Sci 29:409–424, 1998). Despite this, the SA has been identified as standing in tension with the ontological commitments of the so-called ’ontic’ form of this view and so I shall explore that tension before discussing the usefulness of the SA in framing scientific representation and concluding with a discussion of the implications of the ontological status of theories and models themselves.

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Notes

  1. However, whereas Suppe’s intention was to praise the SA, Halvorson’s is to damn it! For a response see van Fraassen (2014).

  2. However, this point does not bite so hard, as it obviously depends on what one means by ‘in name only’. If that means, eliminates objects in a metaphysical sense but not in the everyday physicists’ sense of particle, then the advocate of OSR may cry ‘That’s good enough for me!’.

  3. I’d like to thank one of the referees for pressing me on this.

  4. One of the referees has suggested economics or mathematical decision theory. Unfortunately, I am not sufficiently familiar with these fields to offer a definite view on the nature of the theories involved; for discussion of theories and models in economics, see Kuorikoski and Marchionni (2014).

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  1. School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Steven French

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French, S. (Structural) realism and its representational vehicles. Synthese 194, 3311–3326 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0879-x

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