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Realism, constructivism, and the naiveté of the experimental scientist

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Abstract

The theory of science is as old as science itself, its beginnings going back to Aristotle and possibly further. Its history includes names as prominent as Descartes, Diderot, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Wittgenstein, among others1. It is also just as heterogeneous as science itself, as it has produced a large number of different theories which can only roughly be divided into realistic and constructivistic/relativistic ones. Realists believe in scientific truths and therefore insist that scientific objects exist in reality. Constructivists, in contrast, think that scientific objects, for example quarks, are not real but constructed fictions which are useful to formulate scientific theories which may be empirically adequate to describe experimental results, but not the real world. Each of the two groups of theories comes in a number of variants which attend to different aspects not all of which appear equally plausible to the experimental scientist and lay philosopher. I therefore restrict myself to discussing schools of thought which I conceive as major, and as of some relevance to the life sciences.

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(2008). Realism, constructivism, and the naiveté of the experimental scientist. In: The Network Collective. Birkhäuser Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7643-8373-2_2

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