Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Scientific realism is dead, or so many philosophers believe. Its death was announced when philosophers became convinced that one can accept all scientific results without committing oneself to metaphysical existence claims about theoretical entities (Fine 1986, 112). In addition, the inability of self–proclaimed scientific realists, despite recurrent demands, to distinguish themselves from their rival anti–realists (Stein 1989) didn’t exactly help their cause. If realists cannot identify the key feature or features that set them apart from their opponents, then there is really no need to conduct a debate on scientific realism, is there? Feasting on the corpse, pragmatism soon won over the philosophy of science. If the entities of our best scientific theories do not genuinely refer to any deep underlying ontology, and our acceptance thereof is not dependent on such metaphysical chimeras like “truth” and “reality”, then we could believe in any theory which is useful to us. After all, this is what we mean when we say that “truth is that which works” (James 1907, 8). Partly for independent reasons that shall become clear towards the end of this book, and partly for philosophy’s own sake as a discipline, I strongly believe that it is time to revive scientific realism and to present an alternative to pragmatism. Such revival, however, cannot be done by repeating past mistakes. If the debate on scientific realism is to be reconstructed, it must be so on bases different than those which led to its demise. What follows is an attempt to do just that. But prior to embarking on this ambitious task, I would like to open with an abridged chronicle of scientific realism’s death. My aim is to demonstrate that this death is an artifact of the way the debate has been commonly construed. Hence the main thesis of this opening chapter: that all the definitions of scientific realism that have been entertained up until nowwere doomed to fail from the start, in the sense that by holding to them scientific realists were in principle unequipped with the adequate tools for distinguishing themselves from their anti–realists opponents. No wonder, then, that the debate has generated an ennui among philosophers (Blackburn 2002, 112) and non–philosophers (Gal 2002, 523) alike. The writing, as it were, was on the wall, and it is time to clean it up and to start a–fresh.