The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism by Juha Saatsi

Author:Juha Saatsi
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Typically, realists are committed to policies like M1 and M2. Many realists hold that it is part of the mission of science to give explanations of what we observe in everyday life and in scientific inquiry in terms of deeper, underlying facts, and that such explanations should be interpreted literally as revealing the underlying nature of the world (see J. Saatsi, “Realism and the limits of explanatory reasoning”, ch. 16 of this volume). In contrast, many antirealists are motivated by some form of empiricism, and van Fraassen, who deserves much credit for the resurrection of empiricism in the philosophy of science after the demise of logical empiricism, characterizes (2002) his own brand of empiricism not as a factual proposition, such as “the only source of knowledge of the world is experience”, but rather as a stance.2 Reflecting his conception of empiricism as oppositional to historical traditions of metaphysical theorizing, let me characterize what I will call the “empiricist stance” in terms of policies that are diametrically opposed to the metaphysical stance:

E1. Reject demands for explanation in terms of things underlying the observable.

E2. A fortiori, reject attempts to answer these demands by theorizing about the unobservable.

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