Introduction

This book investigates the sources and contexts of an approach to philosophy of science that emerged during the mid twentieth century and which achieved its most prominent articulation in Thomas Kuhn’s classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.1 My own approach is guided partly by the aim of reconstructing those sources and contexts, and partly by the need – as I see it – to treat them from the vantage point of recent debates on the topic of scientific realism. Those debates can often be highly bewildering for relative newcomers to the field since the term ‘realism’ is itself used in a great variety of senses, some quite technical or far removed from what it signifies in other, less specialist contexts. Likewise with the term ‘anti-realism’, which is sometimes applied in a general way to various opposed lines of argument, but sometimes to a certain logico-semantic (and metaphysical) thesis which denies the existence of unknowable or verification-transcendent truths.