ABSTRACT
I am going to lay my cards on the table and say that I don’t think there is any room in philosophy for theories and theses. So I get nervous and suspicious when the “isms” come marching by. One that makes me particularly nervous is “Scientific Realism.” The reason for that is that I think that historical facts extraneous to both philosophy and to the sciences have been a major subterranean motivation for the belief in what might be called an “ultimate reality” as a goal of, or limit on, scientific work. If we describe that “ultimate reality” as a goal in the sense of something worked toward, and as a limit in the sense of what it is that gives us something to measure our theories against and test their adequacy, then we can see that it is a very appealing notion, one that seems to solve a lot of problems at once.
