Contemporary Scientific Realism: The Challenge from the History of Science Timothy 0197554636 9780197554630

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Product details:

• ISBN-10: 0197554636 
• ISBN-13: 9780197554630
• Author: Timothy D Lyons

Scientific realists claim we can justifiably believe that science is getting at the truth. However, they have faced historical challenges: various episodes across history appear to demonstrate that even strongly supported scientific theories can be overturned and left behind. In response, realists have developed new positions and arguments. As a result of specific challenges from the history of science, and realist responses, we find ourselves with an ever-increasing dataset bearing on the (possible) relationship between science and truth. The present volume introduces new historical cases impacting the debate and advances the discussion of cases that have only very recently been introduced. At the same time, shifts in philosophical positions affect the very kind of case study that is relevant. Thus, the historical work must proceed hand in hand with philosophical analysis of the different positions and arguments in play. It is with this in mind that the volume is divided into two sections, entitled “Historical Cases for the Debate” and “Contemporary Scientific Realism.” All sides agree that historical cases are informative with regard to how, or whether, science connects with truth. Defying proclamations as early as the 1980s announcing the death knell of the scientific realism debate, here is that rare thing: a philosophical debate making steady and definite progress. Moreover, the progress it is making concerns one of humanity’s most profound and important questions: the relationship between science and truth, or, put more boldly, the epistemic relation between humankind and the reality in which we find ourselves.

Table of contents:

1. History and the Contemporary Scientific Realism Debate

Part I Historical Cases for the Debate

2. Theoretical Continuity, Approximate Truth, and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction: Revisiting the Miasma Theory

3. What Can the Discovery of Boron Tell Us About the Scientific Realism Debate?

4. No Miracle after All: The Thomson Brothers’ Novel Prediction that Pressure Lowers the Freezing Point of Water

5. From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence: Descartes, Newton, and Beyond

6. How Was Nicholson’s Proto-Element Theory Able to Yield Explanatory as well as Predictive Success?

7. Selective Scientific Realism and Truth-Transfer in Theories of Molecular Structure

8. Realism, Physical Meaningfulness, and Molecular Spectroscopy

Part II Contemporary Scientific Realism

9. The Historical Challenge to Realism and Essential Deployment

10. Realism, Instrumentalism, Particularism: A Middle Path Forward in the Scientific Realism Debate

11. Structure not Selection

12. The Case of the Consumption Function: Structural Realism in Macroeconomics

13. We Think, They Thought: A Critique of the Pessimistic Meta-Meta-Induction

14. The Paradox of Infinite Limits: A Realist Response

15. Realist Representations of Particles: The Standard Model, Top Down

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