ABSTRACT
Scientific realism takes various forms in various contexts of debate but mostly involves a commitment to the following propositions.1 (1) There exists an objective reality which – contra idealists, ‘strong’ constructivists, and hard-line empiricists – is in no sense dependent on our thoughts, beliefs, descriptions, or theories concerning it. (2) These latter acquire their truth-value, that is, their status as truths or falsehoods, from the way things stand with respect to that objective reality and not from their happening to fall square with some currently favoured paradigm, conceptual scheme, or system of beliefs. (3) Among the vast (indeed limitless) range of truths about the world there are some that we know, some that we don’t but might yet find out, and some that may lie beyond the furthest reach of our perceptual, epistemic, or information-gathering powers. (4) Such truths obtain on every spatial and temporal scale, including (for instance) truths about the microstructural properties of matter, astrophysical objects and events, causal dispositions, laws of nature, historical facts (among them many unrecorded or unnoticed even at the time), prehistoric happenings right back to the origins of the universe, and so forth. Nevertheless (5), in so far as we can claim knowledge of them, that knowledge is acquired through our various procedures of observation, experiment, inductive reasoning, hypothesis-testing, or inference to the best (most adequate) causal explanation.2 Such is the case for ‘convergent realism’, i.e., that if those procedures were not (for the most part) reliably truth-tracking then we could offer no account – short of a miracle or sheer cosmic coincidence – for the success of applied scientific knowledge in curing diseases, getting aircraft to fly, and a great many other achievements.3
