Aug 23, · John Stuart Mill: John Stewart Mill was a philosopher, an economist, a senior official in the East India Company and a son of James Mill. Mill is most well-known for his work, "Principles of Apr 09, · Willard Van Orman Quine (–) worked in theoretical philosophy and in logic. (In practical philosophy—ethics and political philosophy—his contributions are negligible.) He is perhaps best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism (in particular, against its use of the analytic-synthetic distinction) Nov 14, · Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are now many forms of structural realism and an extensive literature about them
Willard Van Orman Quine (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are now many forms of structural realism and an extensive literature about them.
There are interesting connections with debates in metaphysics, philosophy of physics and philosophy of mathematics. This entry is intended to be a comprehensive survey of the field. Scientific realism is the view that we ought to believe in the unobservable entities posited by our most successful scientific theories. It is widely held that the most powerful argument in essays in radical empiricism of scientific realism is the no-miracles argument, according to which the success of science would be miraculous if scientific theories were not essays in radical empiricism least approximately true descriptions of the world, essays in radical empiricism.
While the underdetermination argument is often cited as giving grounds for scepticism about theories of unobservable entities, arguably the most powerful arguments against scientific realism are based on the history of radical theory change in science.
The best-known of these arguments, although not necessarily the most compelling of them, is the notorious pessimistic meta-induction, essays in radical empiricism to which reflection on the abandonment of theories in the history of science motivates the expectation that our best current scientific theories will themselves be abandoned, and hence that we ought not to assent to them.
With respect to the case of the transition in nineteenth-century optics from Fresnel's elastic solid ether theory to Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field, Worrall argues that:, essays in radical empiricism. According to Worrall, we should not accept standard scientific realism, which asserts that the nature of the unobservable objects that cause the phenomena we observe is correctly described by our best theories.
However, neither should we be antirealists about science. Rather, we should adopt structural realism and epistemically commit ourselves only to the mathematical or structural content of our theories.
Since there is says Worrall retention of structure across theory change, structural realism both a avoids the force of the pessimistic meta-induction by not committing us to belief in the theory's description of the furniture of the world and b does not make the success of science especially the novel predictions of mature physical theories seem miraculous by committing us to the claim that the theory's structure, over and above its empirical content, essays in radical empiricism, describes essays in radical empiricism world.
Worrall's paper has been widely cited and has spawned an extensive literature in which various varieties of structural realism are advocated. These contemporary debates recapitulate the work of some of the greatest philosophers of science.
Worrall says he found his structural realism in Henri Poincaréwhose structuralism was combined with neo-Kantian views about the nature of arithmetic and group theory, and with conventionalism about the geometry of space and time. The prevalence of Kantian themes in the literature on structural realism is discussed further below; for more on Poincaré see GiedyminGower and Zahar Ernan McMullin argues that Pierre Duhem was a realist about the relations found in laws but not about explanations in terms of an ontology.
According to WorrallBarry Gower and Elie Zaharessays in radical empiricism, Duhem too was a kind of structural realist, though there are passages in Duhem that more readily lend themselves to an instrumentalist interpretation. Gower's historical survey of structural realism also discusses how structuralism figures in the thought of Ernst Cassirer, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell. Stathis Psillos has explored the connections between structuralism and the Ramsey-sentence approach to scientific theory as it figured in the development of Carnap's philosophy from logical positivism to ontologically relativist empiricism.
Other important pioneers of structuralism about science include Arthur Eddington see Frenchessays in radical empiricism, Grover Maxwell see Ladyman and 3. Ladyman distinguished epistemic and ontic forms of structural realism, and many of those who have taken up structural realism have been philosophers of physics who have developed the latter. Others have made it clear that their structural realism is a purely epistemological refinement of scientific realism.
On the other hand, Bas van Fraassen, essays in radical empiricism, defends an empiricist and non-realist form of structuralism about science, essays in radical empiricism, motivated by an illuminating reconstruction of the origins of structuralism in the debate about the epistemology of physical geometry in the nineteenth century, and more generally in the progressive mathematisation of science.
Yet more kinds of structuralism now abound in contemporary analytic philosophy. These include causal structuralism concerning the individuation of properties, mathematical structuralism concerning the nature of mathematical objects, and structuralism about laws and dispositions. The relationship between structural realism and these views is a matter for further work. While many realists and antirealists alike are agreed that the most viable form of scientific realism is structural realism, many others continue to defend other forms of scientific realism.
This article reviews the issues and provides a guide for further reading. Scientific realism became dominant in philosophy of science after the demise of the forms of antirealism about science associated with the logical positivists, namely semantic instrumentalism, according to which theoretical terms are not to be interpreted as referring to anything, and theoretical reductionism, essays in radical empiricism, according to which theoretical terms are disguised ways of referring to observable phenomena.
These forms of antirealism rely upon discredited doctrines about scientific language, such as that it can be divided into theoretical and observational parts, and that much of it should not be taken literally. Bas van Fraassen revitalised the debate about scientific realism by proposing his constructive empiricism as an alternative.
His antirealism is sceptical rather than dogmatic, and does not depend on the distinction between theoretical and observational terms. On the other hand, he holds that it is perfectly rational to remain agnostic about whether there are any such particles because he argues that to accept the best scientific theories we have only requires believing that they are empirically adequate, in the sense of correctly describing the observable world, rather than believing that they are true simpliciter, essays in radical empiricism.
For more on constructive empiricism see Monton How then are we to decide whether to believe in the full essays in radical empiricism truth of scientific theories, including what they say about unobservable entities such as electrons and black holes, or whether to believe instead merely that our best scientific theories are empirically adequate? Van Fraassen argues that since the latter belief is logically weaker and yet as empirically contentful as the former belief it is natural for an empiricist to go only as far as belief in empirical adequacy.
On the other hand, many philosophers are moved by the fact that belief in only the empirical adequacy of our best scientific theories leaves us unable to explain the phenomena that they describe. Inference to the best explanation is widely believed to be an important form of reasoning in science, and the production of explanations of the world is often supposed to be one of the main successes of science. The no-miracles argument is elaborated in terms of specific features of scientific methodology and practice.
Richard Boydfor example argues that in explaining the success of science, we need to explain essays in radical empiricism overall instrumental success of scientific methods across the history of science. Alan Musgrave says that the only version of the no-miracles argument that might work is one appealing to the novel predictive success of theories.
Some realists, such as Psilloshave gone so far as to argue that only theories which have enjoyed novel predictive success ought to be considered as falling within the scope of arguments for scientific realism. Colin Howsonessays in radical empiricism, P. Magnus and Craig Callenderand Peter Lipton have recently argued that the no-miracles argument is flawed because in order to evaluate the claim that it is probable that theories enjoying empirical success are approximately true we have to know what the relevant base rate is, and there is no way we can know this.
They think we ought to abandon the attempt to defend scientific realism in general rather than on a case-by-case basis, essays in radical empiricism. When it comes to wholesale arguments against scientific realism, perhaps the most influential until recently was the underdetermination argument, according to which the existence of empirical equivalents to our best scientific theories implies that we should withhold epistemic commitment to them.
This is often dismissed by realists as generating doubt about unobservables that is no more worrying than doubting other minds or the external world. They argue that since scientists find ways of choosing between empirically equivalent rivals, philosophers ought not to make too much of merely in-principle possibilities that are irrelevant to scientific practice see Laudan and Leplin, and Kukla The power of the arguments against scientific realism from theory change is that, rather than essays in radical empiricism a priori and theoretical, they are empirically based and their premises are based on data obtained by examining essays in radical empiricism practice and history of science.
Ontological discontinuity in theory change seems to give us grounds not for mere agnosticism but for the positive belief that many central theoretical terms of our best contemporary science will be regarded as non-referring by future science.
They have the basic form:. More precisely, Larry Laudan gave a very influential argument with the following structure:. So, by induction we have positive reason to expect that our best current theories will be replaced by new theories according to which some of the central theoretical terms of our best current theories do not refer, and hence we should not believe in the approximate truth or the successful reference of the theoretical terms of our best current theories.
The most common realist response to this argument is to restrict realism to theories with some further properties usually, maturity, essays in radical empiricism, and novel predictive success so as to cut down essays in radical empiricism inductive base employed in i see Psillos Moreover Peter LewisMarc Lange and Magnus and Callender regard the pessimistic meta-induction as a fallacy of probabilistic reasoning. However, there are arguments from theory change that are not probabilistic.
Note first that there are several cases of mature theories which enjoyed novel predictive success, notably the ether theory of light and the caloric theory of heat.
If their central theoretical terms do not refer, the realist's claim that approximate truth explains empirical success will no longer be enough to establish realism, because we will need some other explanation for the success of the caloric and ether theories.
If this will do for these theories then it ought to do for others where we happened to have retained the central theoretical terms, and then we do not need the realist's preferred explanation that such theories are true and successfully refer to unobservable entities. Laudan's paper was also intended to show that the successful reference of its theoretical terms is not a necessary condition for the novel predictive success of a theory45and there are counter-examples to the no-miracles argument.
I Develop an account of reference according to which the abandoned theoretical terms are regarded as successfully referring after all. However, as C, essays in radical empiricism. This is criticized by Laudan as making the reference of theoretical terms a trivial matter, essays in radical empiricism as long as some phenomena prompt the introduction of a term it will automatically successfully refer to whatever is the relevant cause or causes.
Furthermore, this theory radically disconnects what a theorist is talking about from what she thinks she is talking about. For example, Aristotle or Newton could be said to be referring to geodesic motion in a curved spacetime when, respectively, they talked about the natural motion of material objects, and the fall of a body under the effect of the gravitational force.
II Restrict realism to those parts of theories that play an essential role in the derivation of subsequently observed novel predictions, and then argue that the terms of past theories which are now regarded as non-referring were non-essential and hence that there is no reason to deny that the essential terms in current theories will be retained.
The most detailed and influential response to the argument from theory change is due to Psilloswho combines strategies I and II. Hasok ChangKyle Stanford andMohammed Elsamahi and Timothy Lyons criticize Psillos's account. Other responses include Kitcher's model of reference according to which some tokens of theoretical terms refer and others do not.
Christina McLeish criticizes Kitcher's theory by arguing that there are no satisfactory grounds for making the distinction between referring and non-referring tokens, essays in radical empiricism.
Juha Saatsi denies premise a and claims that there can be approximate truth of the causal roles postulated by a scientific theory without its central terms necessarily successfully referring see also Chakravartty, There is no consensus among those defending standard realism in the face of theory change.
The argument from theory change threatens scientific realism because if what science now says is correct, then the ontologies of past scientific theories are far from accurate accounts of the furniture of the world. If that is so even though they were predictively successful, then the success of our best current theories does not mean they have got the nature of the world right either, essays in radical empiricism.
The structuralist solution to this problem is to give up the attempt to learn about the nature of unobservable entities from science. The metaphysical import of successful scientific theories consists in their giving correct descriptions of the structure of the world. Theories can be very different and yet share all kinds of structure. The task of providing an adequate theory of approximate truth that fits the history of science and directly addresses the problem of ontological continuity has hitherto defeated realists, but a much more tractable problem is to display essays in radical empiricism structural commonalities between different theories.
Hence, a form of realism that is committed only to the structure of theories might not be undermined by theory change, essays in radical empiricism. Gerhard Schurz proves a structural correspondence theorem showing that successive theories that share empirical content also share theoretical content.
McArthur argues that structural realism eliminates both theory essays in radical empiricism in science and scientific discovery. There are numerous examples of continuity in the mathematical structure of successive essays in radical empiricism theories.
There are many cases in quantum mechanics where the Hamiltonian functions that represent the total energy of mechanical systems imitate those of classical mechanics, but with variables like those that stand for position and momentum replaced by Hermitian operators. Simon Saunders a discusses the structural continuities between classical and quantum mechanics and also shows how much structure Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy have in common.
Harvey Brown explains the correspondence between Special Relativity and classical mechanics. Jonathan Bain and John Norton discuss the structural continuity in descriptions of the electron, essays in radical empiricism, as does Angelo Cei Votsis considers examples of continuity and discontinuity in physics. Robert Batterman discusses many examples of limiting relationships between theories, notably the essays in radical empiricism group approach to critical phenomena, and the relationship between wave and ray optics.
Holger Lyre extends Worrall's original example of the continuity between wave optics and electromagnetism by considering the relationship between Maxwellian electrodynamics and Quantum Electrodynamics. Saunders c and d also criticises Tian Cao for underestimating the difficulties with a non-structuralist form of realism in the light of the history of quantum field theory.
The most minimal form of structuralism focuses on empirical structure, and as such is best thought of as a defence of the cumulative nature of science in the face of Kuhnian worries about revolutions following Post Structural realism is often characterised as the view that scientific theories tell us only about the form or structure of the unobservable world and not about its nature.
This leaves open the question as to whether the natures of things are posited to be unknowable for some reason or eliminated altogether. Hence, Ladyman raised the question as to whether Worrall's structural realism is intended as a metaphysical or epistemological modification of standard scientific realism, essays in radical empiricism. Worrall's paper is ambiguous in this respect.
So one way of thinking about structural realism is as an epistemological modification of scientific realism to the effect that we only believe what scientific theories tell us about the relations entered into by unobservable objects, and suspend judgement as to the nature of the latter. There are various forms this might take.
Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James - Audiobook
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Apr 09, · Willard Van Orman Quine (–) worked in theoretical philosophy and in logic. (In practical philosophy—ethics and political philosophy—his contributions are negligible.) He is perhaps best known for his arguments against Logical Empiricism (in particular, against its use of the analytic-synthetic distinction) Nov 14, · Structural realism is considered by many realists and antirealists alike as the most defensible form of scientific realism. There are now many forms of structural realism and an extensive literature about them Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, – November 9, ) was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist, feminist, and pop music critic.A collection of her essays, The Essential Ellen Willis, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
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