ABSTRACT
The explanationist defence of realism (EDR) has suffered a rather serious blow from Laudan’s contention that the history of science itself destroys the credibility of realist explanation of the success of science. For it is full of theories which were once empirically successful and yet turned out to be false. Laudan’s argument1 against scientific realism is simple but powerful. It can be summarised as follows:
The history of sciencc is full of theories which at different times and for long periods had been empirically successful, and yet were shown to be false in the deep-structure claims they made about the world. It is similarly full of theoretical terms featuring in successful theories which do not refer. Therefore, by a simple (meta-)induction on scientific theories, our current successful theories are likely to be false (or, at any rate, are more likely to be false than true), and many or most of the theoretical terms featuring in them will turn out to be non-referential.
