Scientific realism is a philosophical view to the nature of scientific endeavor. Scientific realism is an epistemological, semantic and normative thesis about science. The epistemological commitment of scientific realism is that acceptance of a scientific theory is belief that what it says about unobservables is true or approximately true. The semantic commitment of scientific realism is that scientific theories are semantically literal, that is, that the language of scientific theories is not interperetable into language about some other domain without change in meaning. The normative commitment of scientific realism is that scientific theories aim at truth about unobservables.

A further tenet of scientific realism is that scientific knowledge is progressive in nature, that is, it builds on previous understanding.

History of Scientific Realism

Logical positivism was the first philosophy of science in the modern era; by many standards, it was the first philosophy of science. Logical positivists were not scientific realists. They believed that a distinction between observational terms and theoretical terms could be sharply drawn and that theoretical terms could be sematically analyzed in observational and logical terms.

The downfall of logical positivism, which was the received view of science for about fifty years, lead to the rise of scientific realism. Important criticisms of logical positivism involved the difficulties with the verification theory of meaning (for which see Hempel (1950)), troubles with the analytic-synthetic distinction (for which see Quine (1950), the theory ladenness of observation (for which see Kuhn (1970) and Quine (1960)), and diffculties moving from the observationality of terms to observationality of sentences (for which see Putnam (1962)), and the vaguness of the observational theoretical distiction (for which see Maxwell (1962)). Scientific realism is suggested, though arguably not entailed, by all of these criticisms.

Scientific Realism, edited by Jarrett Leplin, is an important anthology of articles on scientific realism.

Arguments for and against Scientific Realism

One of the main arguments for scientific realism is that scientific knowledge is progressive in nature, and that it is able to predict phenomena successfully. For example, a scientific realist would point out that science must have some ontological basis for humans to successfully send explorers to the moon.

Against scientific realism, social constructivists (and other anti-realists) point out that scientific realism is unable to account for the rapid change that occurs in scientific knowledge during periods of revolution.

References

• Hempel, Carl. (1950) "Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance" in Boyd, Richard et al. eds. (1990) The Philosophy of Science Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Kuhn, Thomas. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Edition Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Leplin, Jarrett. (1984). Scientific Realism. California: University of California Press.
• Leplin, Jarrett. (1997). A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Maxwell, Grover (1962) "The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entites" in Feigl and Maxwell Scientific Explantion, Space, and Time vol. 3, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 3-15.
• Putnam, Hilary. (1962) "What Theories are Not" in Ernst Nagel et al. (1962) Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science Stanford University Press.
• Quine, W.V.O. (1951) "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in his (1953) From a Logical Point of View Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Quine, W.V.O. (1960) Word and Object Cambridge: MIT Press.