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How Not to Be a Realist

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Structural Realism

Part of the book series: The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science ((WONS,volume 77))

Abstract

When it comes to name-calling, structural realists have heard pretty much all of it. Among the many insults, they have been called ‘empiricist anti-realists’ but also ‘traditional scientific realists’. Obviously the collapse accusations that motivate these two insults cannot both be true at the same time. The aim of this paper is to defend the epistemic variety of structural realism against the accusation of collapse to traditional scientific realism. In so doing, I turn the tables on traditional scientific realists by presenting them with a dilemma. They can either opt for a construal of their view that permits epistemic access to non-structural features of unobservables but then face the daunting task of substantiating a claim that up till now has failed to deliver the goods or they can drop the problematic requirement of epistemic access to non-structural features but then face a collapse to epistemic structural realism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a detailed critical survey see [8].

  2. 2.

    Many authors neglect the fact that in his original presentation of ESR Worrall [30] does not advocate the Ramsey sentence approach—indeed he makes no mention of it.

  3. 3.

    The identification of indirect realism with representationalism should be resisted. The latter is simply one manifestation of the former.

  4. 4.

    I have dealt with Psillos’ objections to the structure vs. nature distinction in my [28].

  5. 5.

    It is not a-priori impossible that realism and anti-realism are ultimately identical positions. Such a suggestion is implicit in the work of some philosophers who wish to dissolve the scientific realism debate. Although there may be something to this suggestion, my target audience for this paper is those for whom the legitimacy of the scientific realism debate is not at issue.

  6. 6.

    Russell in fact advocated a more general version of this principle, namely that all events are spatiotemporally continuous. The special case of the principle is established once one takes into account that percepts as well as their unobservables causes are events in his view.

  7. 7.

    To maintain some measure of perceptual veridicality even those who reject ESR must accept some such assumption.

  8. 8.

    One of his examples is the assertion ‘Nothing is older than 6000 years old’ in the theoretical dispute between the Darwinists and the Creationists.

  9. 9.

    This claim holds at least in so far as scientific realists explicitly endorse specific non-structural knowledge. Those scientific realists who do not endorse this claim are dealt with in Section 3.6.

  10. 10.

    Theoretical components may of course survive theory change without playing an essential role in the predictive and explanatory success of their respective theories. Having said this, one expects to find a high degree of correlation between the survival of theoretical components and their integral role in the success of the theories they belong to for the simple reason that scientists generally aim to increase empirical success and eliminate idle wheels. For more on this see [29].

  11. 11.

    In my view the wave’s amplitude is not a theoretical component because it is the kind of quantity that can be measured, i.e. it is a broadly construed observable quantity. Its survival is thus no threat to ESR.

  12. 12.

    Jonathan Bain also makes this point when he says that what Psillos calls the ‘minimal mechanical assumption’ ‘was used solely to express the energy associated with a light-wave as the square of its amplitude with no essential reference to the medium of oscillation. Hence, again, one can argue that the aether was not used in the derivation’ [1, p. 163].

  13. 13.

    Our understanding of this relation is adjusted by the factor \(\frac{1}{2}\).

  14. 14.

    Redhead makes a similar observation (without however elaborating) when he says: ‘Psillos presents detailed case studies for the examples of caloric and ether but what the discussion boils down to seems to be that structural aspects of the old theory are preserved in the new theory’ [20, p. 344].

  15. 15.

    In my view, the realist must choose on some principled basis which theory of reference to apply, otherwise the whole issue becomes trivialised.

  16. 16.

    Along similar lines, Maxwell Grover [13] has argued that the theoretical variables of a Ramsey sentence refer indirectly to unobservable objects. They do so implicitly via their logical relations to unRamsified (i.e. observational) terms that refer directly to observable objects (pp. 182–183).

  17. 17.

    To establish that approximate truth is a sufficient condition for referential success is of course to establish that referential success is a necessary condition for approximate truth.

  18. 18.

    Even then, the advocate of this approach must still explain why it is that referential semantics is good for observational terms but bad otherwise.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Elaine Landry for inviting me to the Structure, Objects and Causality workshop, which she masterfully organised in Banff, Canada in August 2007 and where this paper was first presented. I am also very grateful to the participants of the workshop as well as to my colleague Ludwig Fahrbach for providing valuable feedback. Finally, I am indebted to the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for making the writing of this paper possible by funding my research (project B6 of the interdisciplinary research unit FOR 600 ‘Functional Concepts and Frames’).

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  1. Philosophisches Institut, University of Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Ioannis Votsis

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  1. University of California, Davis, 95616, California, USA

    Elaine Landry

  2. Unit for History & Philosophy of, Science, University of Sidney, Sydney, 2006, New South Wales, Australia

    Dean Rickles

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Votsis, I. (2012). How Not to Be a Realist. In: Landry, E., Rickles, D. (eds) Structural Realism. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 77. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2579-9_3

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