ABSTRACT
Alfred Nordmann offers a hermeneutic reading of my accounts of theories, models and empirical success that I much welcome and for one special reason that I shall explain. Often the question arises, am I a scientific realist. It arises not least because I claim in The Dappled World that I had earlier wanted to attack realism-particularly the claim that our best scientific laws are approximately true. By contrast, in The Dappled World I take many of the laws as true-so long as we affix the right kind of ceteris paribus clause to them: The laws are true so long as the right kind of arrangement and interaction of capacities to generate them is in place and operates without interference.
