ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most influential realist view in recent years, structural realism’s appeal can be found in the ease with which it seems to explain away certain difficulties that afflict other, more traditional versions of realism. Roughly formulated, it is the view that our epistemic and perhaps even our ontic commitments must be reduced to the structural as opposed to the non-structural features that successful scientific theories ascribe to the unobservable world. In this chapter, we survey the conceptual foundations as well as the presumed advantages and disadvantages of structural realism.
