ABSTRACT
Scientists often claim explicitly that their theories describe portions or aspects of the real world, but is this self-assessment really correct? Do scientifi c theories describe the world? Do they aim at such description? Should they do so? Philosophers of science, in contrast with its practitioners, are notoriously divided over these questions and the divide is one demarcation in the scientifi c realism debate. Scientifi c realists fully accept the sciences’ self-appraisal and hold that theories indeed aim at accurately describing the world and progressively approximate this aim. By contrast, for their antirealist opponents an epistemologically legitimate goal of science is just to devise structures generating acceptable explanations and approximately true predictions for those phenomena we directly observe.
