Realism, Common Sense, and Science

@article{Caro2015RealismCS,
  title={Realism, Common Sense, and Science},
  author={Mario De Caro},
  journal={The Monist},
  year={2015},
  volume={98},
  pages={197-214},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:145176956}
}
  • M. D. Caro
  • Published 1 April 2015
  • Philosophy
  • The Monist
After a long period of unpopularity, philosophical realism is enjoying a revival. According to some of its contemporary versions, the world consists in just what the ordinary view of the world assumes, while the unobservable entities postulated by scientific theories are nothing more than fictions. Some other versions, in contrast, accept only the ontology of the best scientific theories and assume a reductionist or eliminationist stance towards the entities postulated by common sense. In this… 
View via Publisher
iris.uniroma3.it
20 Citations
Background Citations
10

20 Citations

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, XIII-2 | 2021

In this paper I investigate Hilary Putnam’s conception of scientific realism by examining the socalled “no miracles argument.” According to a widespread reconstruction of his thought, Putnam has been…

Between the Placement Problem and the Reconciliation Problem. Philosophical Naturalism Today

Scientific naturalism—the conception according to which the natural sciences, and possibly physics alone, set the limits of ontology and epistemology—is characterized by a strong monistic tendency.…

Why Naturalism cannot (Merely) be an Attitude

Varying forms of ontological and methodological naturalism are among the most popular theses in contemporary philosophy. However, each of these theses faces a different dilemma: ontological…

Why the Mind Matters: The Manifest Image of the World

This chapter considers what arguably is the focal point of the conflict between the scientific and the manifest image of the world, namely normativity, which concerns not only human action, but…

What’s New About New Realism? Mereology and the Varieties of (New) Realism

The paper set up a small “philosophical lab” for thought experiments using Digital Universes as its main tool. Digital Universes allow us to examine how mereology affects the debate on New Realism of…

What’s New About New Realism? Mereology and the Varieties of (New) Realism

The paper set up a small “philosophical lab” for thought experiments using Digital Universes as its main tool. Digital Universes allow us to examine how mereology affects the debate on New Realism of…

Conservatism and Common-Sense Realism

I. INTRODUCTIONPaul Engelmann, the Austrian architect who became a friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein's during World War I, writes that although the notion of "a God in the sense of the Bible, the image…

Normative relations, mind points and social ontology

The paper spells out an argument to the effect that rejecting what Sellars denounces as the “myth of the given” has a bearing not only on epistemology, but also on ontology: we get to recognizing…

Hilary Putnam on Perspectivism and Naturalism

In this chapter, I analyze the different views that Hilary Putnam developed during the seven decades of his brilliant philosophical career in order to address the question of realism (metaphysical…

What Bergson should have said about special relativity

Five reasons why Bergson criticised Einstein for giving up absolute time are discussed, including Bergson’s commitment to an intuitionist, anti-Kantian metaphysics informed by common sense and the pointy relativistic variant of this theory of time.

55 References

A metaphysics for scientific realism

Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mindindependent world. Debates between realists…

Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism

Chasing Reality deals with the controversies over the reality of the external world. Distinguished philosopher Mario Bunge offers an extended defence of realism, a critique of various forms of…

On the Preferability of Epistemic Structural Realism

It will be that a weaker version of the form of realism, mainly developed by Steven French and James Ladyman, is more plausible – namely, epistemic structural realism.

Science and the Modest Image of Epistemology

In Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man (1963) Wilfrid Sellars raises a problem for the very possibility of normative epistemology.  How can the “scientific image”, which celebrates the causal…

Naturalism Without Representationalism

1. The relevance of science to philosophy What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The…

What is Wrong with Husserl's Scientific Anti-Realism?

Abstract Not much scholarly work is needed in order to stumble across many passages where Edmund Husserl seems to advocate an anti-realist attitude towards the natural sciences. This tendency,…

Quine on Objects: Realism or Anti-Realism?

W. V. Quine describes himself as a “robust realist” about physical objects in the external world. This realism about objects is due to Quine's naturalism. On the other hand, Quine's naturalistic…

The Question of Realism

My aim in this paper is to help lay the conceptual and methodological foundations for the study of realism. I come to two main conclusions: first, that there is a primitive metaphysical concept of…

Is Structural Realism Possible

This paper examines in detail two paths that lead to Structural Realism (SR), viz. a substantive philosophical position which asserts that only the structure of the world is knowable. The upward path…

Naturalism in Question

Today the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to the "naturalist" credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account…
...