REALISM RESCUED
by
JERROLD L. ARONSON, ROM HARRE and EILEEN CORNELL WAY
(London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.,Ltd.,1994)
The Realism Debate
- Introduction: the weakness of 'modest realism'
- What is at issue between realists and anti-realists?
- An outline of our approach
- Why logicism must be abandoned
- Salvaging the concepts of truth and versimilitude for science
- An inductive strategy for assessing verisimilitude
The Language of Science
- The structure of the argument
- How kinds are constituted and a type-terminology acquires its meaning
- Deficiencies in the similarity account
- Limitations to family resemblance
- Weaknesses in prototype/core account
- How types are interrelated in hierarchies
- Difficulties with class inclusion
- Problems with common extension or intension
- The relation of determinate to determinable
- The inheritance of second-order properties
- Type-hierarchies and natural kinds
- How relations among natural kinds are reflected in the structure of type-hierarchies
A Naturalistic analysis of the uses of models in science
- Models and theories
- What do scientific discourses describe?
- The modelling relation analysed as type-identity
- The analogy structure of a model
- The fine structure of the content of some middle-level theories
- The plausibility and inplausibility of theories
- The sources of explanatory models
- Theory families and their virtual worlds as systems
Some proposals for the formal analysis of the use of models in science
- A summary of the naturalistic treatment of models in phusical science
- The use of the concept of /model/ in logic and mathematics
- The standard use:models and the interpretation of calculi
- Models in physics, taken formally
- Summary of the argument so far
- The 'set-theoretic' or 'non-statement' account of models and theories
- Icon and Bild: Hertz's account of mechanics
- Summary
The type-hierarchy approach to models
- The traditional account of models
- Problems with the traditional approach to models and analogies
- The alleged dispensability of models
- The problem of filtering positive from negative analogies
- The problem of trivial and non-trivial analogies
Giere's approach and the problem of taking bare similarity as the basic unanalysed relation
- The traditional approach to literal and metaphorical language
- Type-hierarchies depict literal and metaphorical language
- Contrasting the type-hierarchy approach to models with the comparison view
- Analogies reconceived
- Conclusion
Scientific realism and truth
- The traditional picture and tis problems
- Devitt and the rejection of bivalent realism
- Similaritiy and type-hierarchies
- An illustration of the type-hierarchy approach to versimilitude
- Truth and verisimilitude
- Conclusion: truth and scientific realism
Conditionals and the modalities of scientific thought
- The problem of contrary-to-fact conditionals
- The 'possible worlds' approach to the interpretation of the modalities of scientific discourse
- The 'consequence' approach and the problem of cotenability
- An ontological approach to the interpretation of the content of the laws of nature
- The consequence approach revised
- A recipe or procedure for evaluating counterfactuals
- Some comparisons between the approaches
- Virtual worlds versus possible worlds
- Moral verisimilitude
A realist theory of properties
- Properties in physics: the primary and secondary quality distinction
- The conditionality of properties I: simple dispositions
- The conditionality of properties II: complex dispositions
- The ontosemantics of three new physical properties
- Properties in quantum field theory: type hierarchies agains
The intersection of metaphysics and epistemology
- The argument that would establish realism
- The semantic basis of realism summarised
- The principle of epistemic invariance
- The induction over particulars
- The induction over types
- The final step: betting on 'truth'