摘要:

SummaryThis paper addresses the question of what scientific realism implies and what it does not when it is articulated so as to provide the best defense against plausible philosophical alternatives. A summary is presented of “abductive” arguments for scientific realism, and of the epistemological and semantic conceptions upon which they depend. Taking these arguments to be the best current defense of realism, it is inquired what, in the sense just mentioned, realism implies and what it does not. It is concluded that realism implies the strong rejection of epistemological foundationalism, a non‐Humean conception of causation and of explanation, and a causal rather than conceptual account of the unity of natural definitions. It is denied that realism implies bivalence or the existence of one true theory, one preferred vocabulary or one distinctly privileged science. It is further denied that realism implies that there are no unrecognized conventional aspects to scientific theorizing and it is denied that realism implies that scientists routinely do good experimental metaph

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00928.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

SummaryEllis, Jardine and Putnam have argued that the would‐be scientific realist can only avoid being a metaphysical realist (one who deploys a recognition transcendent conception of truth) by becoming an “internal realist” (one who adopts a pragmatic construal of truth). While metaphysical realism is unattractive, the approaches to truth offered by Ellis, Jardine and Putnam are quite unacceptable. However, the is no reason to think that one who wishes to be a scientific realist is limited to these two op

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00929.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00930.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

SummaryAfter exposing certain confusions (between epistemological and ontological points of view, between two levels of the given, between that which represents and that which is represented, between elements and relations), 1 give a sketch of a non‐metaphysical realism which involves the construction of a world‐O, mainly by means of criteria of invariance and of independence of variables.This world‐O facilitates description of the relationships of sensations among themselves and with actions. It includes the subject objectivized with his subjectivity (subject‐O), which makes it possible to describe without difficulty the relationship (of a causal nature) between this subject and the world. This realism reconstructs as it were realism from an idealist standpoint, but allows for all the distinctions characteristic of realism: between illusion and reality, between that which represents and that which is represented, etc. Finally, the world‐O is not its own standard: the sensations for which it makes prediction are compared with those that are actually perceived, thus allowing its appropriateness to be

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00931.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

SummaryScientific realism is here made equivalent to the referentiality of scientific language. A clear distinction (though without separation) of meaning and reference is advocated and certain ‘symptoms' of referentiality in scientific language are stressed. It is then shown that contemporary scholars (correctly) stressing the contextual determination of meaning, the meaning variance and theory‐ladenness of all terms in scientific theories, often fail to recognize that an independent ‘stable’ core of the meaning (bound to extralinguistic operational criteria) still exists. This allows for theory comparison and is witness that science investigates reality, provided one is aware that different kinds of reality are investigated by different sciences. Naive realism amounts to disregarding that no access to reality is given outside meaning and language, naive antirealism amounts to overlooking that language refers to something different from language

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00932.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

SummaryThe main argument for scientific realism is that our present theories in science are so successful empirically that they can't have got that way by chance ‐ instead they must somehow have latched onto the blueprint of the universe. The main argument against scientific realism is that there have been enormously successful theories which were once accepted but are now regarded as false. The central question addressed in this paper is whether there is some reasonable way to have the best of both worlds: to give the argument from scientific revolutions its full weight and yet still adopt some sort of realist attitude towards presently accepted theories in physics and elsewhere. I argue that there is such a way ‐ throughstructuralrealism, a position adopted by Poincare, and here elaborated and defen

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00933.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

SummaryThis essay concerns the concept of reality, considered in the perspective of physics. It tries to reconstruct the process of thought by which this concept is constituted. In this process, reality is transferred from the lived experience of existence, apprehended in the simple consciousness of oneself, to what gives itself, in experience, as an independent source of givenness, and finally to the world, as ultimate condition of the phenomena. In physics, we have to do with an approach of reality which is in terms of representation and no more in terms of lived experience. But in contemporary physics the representation (as theoretical construction) is intimately connected with our praxis. What is really described is not the manifest as such, but the manifestation (as process). The discourse of representation is no more about the phenomena themselves but about the conditions in which the phenomenon constitutes itself as phenomenon. The discourse of physics becomes thus more and more transcendental. But it integrates the transcendental discourse in the representation, giving a concrete appresentation (in a mathematical construction) of the non‐representable process of the becoming manifest of realit

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00934.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00935.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

ResumeLes avancées que la physique a effectuées au cours de notre siècle rendent intertables beaucoup des vues de la philosophie réalistetraditionnelle.Mais ce n'est pas à dire que la position réaliste, conçue au sens large, doive, ou même puisse, être abandonée. Le texte vise à montrer qu'il n'en est rien. Plus précisément il cherche àétablir (i) que l'idée ? une réalité dontl'existencene relève pas de l'esprit humain demeure une idée nécessaire, (ii) qu'il est même légitime de concevoir une telle réalité commeentrevuegräce aux activités noétiques de l'homme, mais (iii) que cependant il semble aujourd'hui hautement présomptueux de concevoir les choses observées comme des éléments de la ≫réalité≫ dont il s'agit. Les phénomènes, qui sont l'objet de la physique, constituent cependant eux‐mêmes une réalité en un autre sens, puisqu'ils forment un ensemble doué? une forte structuration et ? une relative mais large autonomic par rapport à nous. La distinction proposée entre ≫réalité indépendante≪ ‐ dont ľ'existence ne reléve pas de l'homme ‐ et ≫réalité empirique≪ ‐ ou ensemble des phénoménes ‐ paraît done maintenant être une bonne clé pour l'intelligence du donné.SummaryThe advances of physics in this century have made a number of views oftraditionalrealist philosophy untenable. But this is not to say that the ‘realist position, in the broad sense', must or even can be abandoned ‐ as it is the aim of this work to show. More specifically, the aim is to establish (i) that the idea of ‘reality, theexistenceof which does not depend of the human mind', remains necessary, (ii) that one may even consider that the noetic activities of men let themcatch a glimpseof the reality in question, but (iii) that today, however, it seems highly presumptuous to consider observed things as elements of the “reality” that we are concerned with here. Phenomena, which are the subject of physics, do however constitute a reality in another sense, since they form a whole endowed with structure and with a relative but extensive autonomy in relation to us. The proposed distinction between “independent reality” ‐ the existence of which does not depend on man ‐ and “empirical reality” ‐ or all

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00936.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

SummaryThe platonist, in affirming the principle of bivalence for sentences for which there is no decision procedure, disconnects their truth‐conditions from conditions that would enable us to prove them ‐ as if Goldbach's conjecture, say, might just happen to be true (§1). According to Dummett, what has gone wrong here is that the meaning of the relevant sentences has been conceived so as to go beyond what could be learned in learning to use them, or displayed in using them competently (§2). Dummett draws the general conclusion that accounts of meaning must traffic only in decidable circumstances (§3). I suggest (§5) that Dummett can be right about platonism but wrong in this general conclusion: the centrality of decidable circumstances in competent use of language is a special feature of mathematical language. (The epistemology of understanding yields no good argument against this suggestion: ≪4.) This means that someone who recoils from the anti‐realism constituted by Dummett's generalized anti‐platonism, in the case of, say, statements about other minds, need not be recoiling into a close analogue of platonism, as Dummett suggests (§6). We can reinstate the intuitive idea that platonism goes wrong by inappropriately modelling the epistemology and metaphysics of mathematics on the epistemology and metaphysics of the natural world. And we make room for the suggestion (§§7‐9) that anti‐realism makes a converse mistake; in this vein, I propose a picture of Dummettian anti‐realism as a novel expression of familiar and suspect epistemological and

ISSN:0012-2017    

DOI:10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00937.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1989

数据来源: WILEY