ABSTRACT
It is time to step back a moment from the details of the realists’ argument to look at its general strategy. Fundamentally, the realist is utilizing, as we have seen, an abductive inference which proceeds from the success of science to the conclusion that science is approximately true, verisimilar, or referential (or any combination of these). This argument is meant to show the sceptic that theories are not ill-gotten, the positivist that theories are not reducible to their observational consequences, and the pragmatist that classical epistemic categories (e.g., ‘truth’, ‘falsehood’) are a relevant part of meta-scientifi c discourse.
