Meta-Level Reflections on the Scientific Realism Debate

Conference description: 

It has repeatedly been claimed that the debate on scientific realism is a mess. While realists have always felt that major theories are too successful to be false, many find such confidence difficult to reconcile with the history and practice of science and thus seek to establish more cautious accounts of how to discern reasonably secure parts of scientific knowledge. The debate is thriving, to be sure, but for all its sophistication some think it is bound to end in stalemate: Taking the history and practice of science into account, at any rate, has not led to anything like closure, but rather to a wealth of case studies so controversial as to turn many people away from the debate altogether.

In this conference, we will take a step back and reconsider the nature, value, and means of the debate. Indeed, there have been clear signs of a particularist as well as a pragmatic turn for some time. Particularists, on the one hand, might endorse the proliferation of case studies while arguing that philosophical considerations must yield to scientific evidence for or against any specific claims under consideration. Pragmatists, on the other hand, might embrace the proliferation of philosophical accounts while arguing that they will ultimately rest on opposing stances rather than solid evidence of any kind. This raises further questions as to whether there might be any grounds to adopt one stance over another. There are those who advocate voluntarism in this respect, but many would rather see practical implications for research, science policy, science communication, or the social role of science being explored and taken into account accordingly.

How promising are these developments? To address this, our conference will bring together scholars who are particularly interested in exploring:

- The importance and limitations of using case studies in the realism debate.

- The need (or needlessness) to justify the adoption of a certain stance in the debate.

- The usefulness of the debate for science, science policy, or society at large.

- Other approaches to rendering the debate more fruitful.

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Suggested readings:

Boucher, Sandy C. & Forbes, Curtis, 2024. “The pragmatic turn in the scientific realism debate”, in: Synthese 203/4. 1-23.

Brousalis, Kosmas & Psillos, Stathis, 2023. “Learning to Live with a Circle: Reflective Equilibrium and the Received View of the Scientific Realism Debate”, in: Global Philosophy 33/5. 1-21.

Chakravartty, Anjan, 2017. Scientific Ontology. Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology, New York: Oxford University Press.

Egg, Matthias, 2024. “Stances and Doctrines in Scientific Metaphysics”, in: Scientific Theories and Philosophical Stances. Themes from van Fraassen, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. 181-192.

Forbes, Curtis, 2017. “A pragmatic, existentialist approach to the scientific realism debate”, in: Synthese 194/9. 3327-3346.

Henderson, Leah, 2018. “Global versus local arguments for realism”, in: Juha Saatsi (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism, London: Routledge.151-163.

Psillos, Stathis, 2011. “Choosing the realist framework”, in: Synthese 180/2. 301-316.

Stanford, P. Kyle, 2021. “Realism, Instrumentalism, Particularism: A Middle Path Forward in the Scientific Realism Debate”, in: Timothy D. Lyons / Peter Vickers (eds.), Contemporary Scientific Realism: The Challenge From the History of Science, New York: Oxford University Press. 216-238.

Vickers, Peter, 2023. Identifying Future-Proof Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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This conference is part of the project Extending the Scope of Causal Realism, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.