Entity Realism Beyond Manipulation

Entity realism (also known as ‘experimental realism’) traditionally ties belief in scientific entities to experimental manipulation. Yet many sciences involve a commitment to entities that we cannot manipulate, such as black holes in cosmology, mantle convection in geophysics, or common ancestors in evolutionary biology. So what—if anything—warrants belief in these entities?

Recent work in the philosophy of science, especially in the epistemology and methodology of observational, computational, and historical sciences, has extended our understanding of experimental practice beyond manipulation—to include, for example, detection, measurement, robustness reasoning, modeling, simulation, analogue experiments, and natural experiments. While these developments have been addressed in the more recent literature on entity realism, we are yet to see a systematic debate exploring the full extent of their implications.

This workshop aims to bring together philosophers working on these issues to explore how entity realism could be extended beyond experimental manipulation. We invite contributions that:

- develop, refine, or critically assess (anti-)realist accounts of experimental practice beyond direct manipulation;

- assess whether or to what extent insights from entity realism apply to non-experimental sciences;

- or provide pertinent case studies from observational, computational, or historical sciences (e.g., astronomy and cosmology, planetary science, geophysics, climate science, paleobiology, and archeology).

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

https://www.philosophie.unibe.ch/research/projects/extending_the_scope_of_causal_realism/index_eng.html