Reading Nature: The Interpretation of Scientific Theories

(Draft: Please do not cite or quote without permission. Comments welcome.) 1. On the one hand, I think it is fair to say that philosophers recognize a special problem or question about how we are to " interpret " scientific theories only in light of their concerns about whether we are really entitled to believe what those theories say when they are interpreted in what we see as the most natural or straightforward or intuitive way. On the other hand, this fundamental worry reaches all the way back to the inception of scientific inquiry itself, no matter how liberally we conceive of that enterprise. Before the relatively recent professionalization of academic fields, such concerns were well-represented among the figures who served simultaneously as both the leading practitioners and the leading philosophers of science. This is nicely illustrated by the strident debates throughout this community in the 18 th and 19 th centuries concerning whether only pure inductive methods were legitimate for scientific inquiry and/or whether the competing " method of hypothesis " could produce any genuine knowledge of nature (see Laudan 1981 Ch. 8). Having more-or-less settled that scientific inquiry really does proceed by proposing theories or hypotheses about the entities, events, and dynamical principles at work in the various domains of nature, the position known as scientific realism has struck many as incorporating the most natural or straightforward view of how to interpret those