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Realism in the Battle with Scientific Anti-realism: Does Scientific Realism Have Capacity of Overcoming Antirealistic Challenges?

Akbari Takhtameshlou, Javad | 2014

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  1. Type of Document: Ph.D. Dissertation
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 46391 (42)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Philosophy of Science
  6. Advisor(s): Golshani, Mehdi
  7. Abstract:
  8. Earlier in the philosophical tradition, the realists’ view that world exist in itself, independently of our knowledge, had been challenged by idealists, who denied such existence and considered the world and its objects as a function of (our) perception. Today, some philosophers have challenged the (scientific) realists’ belief in the existence of scientific unobservable entities, such as electrons, quarks, forces, gravitational fields, cells, bacteria, genes and so on, that are posited by the modern scientific theories. The debates which have been made in this regard, in recent decades, have spurred an important controversy known as “scientific realism and antirealism debate” in the field of philosophy of science. In this debate, besides offering reasons for their position, each side raises some substantial and serious challenges against the opposing positions and this debate now represents one of the key, hot, and controversial issues of the contemporary philosophy of science. While realists see the offering of a true description of the world as the aim of science and believe that science is largely successful in achieving this aim, anti-realists, by distinguishing between the observable part of the world (nature) and its unobservable part and by attributing different ontological and epistemological rules to each of them, accept the truth of scientific claims and theories only about the former part. For some anti-realists, when scientists speak of unobservable entities such as atoms, electrons, genes, etc., they do not really want to attribute a real existence to them, but they invent and create such entities only as useful fictions (tools) which facilitate the process of predicting the observable (natural) phenomena and thinking about such phenomena. In this view, the existence of every unobservable entity and even the very existence of any unobservable domain in nature is denied. Another group of anti-realists merely denies the possibility of knowing unobservable domains, rather than denying their existence in nature. According to this group, the cognitive faculties of man never allow him to gain even the slightest knowledge of the unobservable domain and its possible inhabitants. In contrast, realists believe that since some observable natural phenomena can be explained only by positing specific unobservable entities and some special properties for them, therefore, we can take steps in the direction of knowing the unobservable part of the world and even successfully apply the resulting knowledge in different affairs.
    Since the debate between realists and anti-realists has not reached a conclusive point and anti-realists’ challenges are not easily ignorable, the present thesis discusses and criticizes the anti-realists’ arguments and their challenges against realism and the responses by realists, and tries to make an assessment and judgment about the acceptability of these positions
  9. Keywords:
  10. Science ; Observability ; Antirealism ; Scientific Realism ; Mind-Independent World ; Theoritical Entities ; Pessimistic Induction

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