Abstract
In this fifth chapter, I will argue for the main thesis of the first part of this book, according to which objective scientific realism (OSR) is bound up in a double stalemate. First, I reconstruct the main arguments against OSR. This shows why three different families of neo- and anti-realist challanges, underdetermination arguments, historical arguments and anti-totality arguments, put OSR in irresolvable difficulties. I mainly refer to Chakravartty’s semirealism as a relevant, topical contribution to show how it fails despite its subtle construction. It also becomes obvious that the counter-arguments do not establish a better position in the form of an anti-realism in philosophy of science. This is the first stalemate between anti-realism and OSR in philosophy of science. Second, I show why the more recent solution of structural realism, which partly takes into account the basic constellation of the first stalemate, ends up repeating the manoeuvres of the original debate. Since what I will call antitotality arguments, which constitute one of the three central challenges to OSR are not fully comprehended, structural realism itself falls back into the patern of the first stalemate. I demonstrate this by reconstructing the argumentation of Steven French’s ontic structural realism and comparing it to Chakravartty’s semirealism. My analyses of Chakravartty’s attempt to justify OSR as well as French’s attempt to overcome it provide reasons why both are able to raise legitimate objections to each other without being able to refute the arguments against their own position. This demonstrates the second stalemate: That between subtle and structural realist OSR. Thus, I conclude by drawing a summary from the entirety of the first part of this book for the case of the metalocal debate in philosophy of science by arguing for the necessity of a New Realism in philosophy of science, a new scientific realism. In my view, this is the only way to resolve both stalemates.
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Notes
- 1.
These are mainly anti-realist arguments. Some of the arguments cited are (also) formulated by objective or new realists, but the anti-realist critique should be emphasised.
- 2.
In his discussion of Millikan’s and Papineau’s philosophy of mind and language, Demmerling writes: “Scientific theories are incapable of thematising phenomena of meaning: nature has no meaning, there is no meaning in nature.” Demmerling 2002, 120, my translation; while Gabriel objects to naturalism as a metaphysical theory option: “Although NONT (the naive ontology) provides an ultimately incoherent framework of premises, it underlies the naturalistic metaphysics that is customary today.” Gabriel 2016, p. 89, my translation; further criticism can be found in: Spiegel 2020.
- 3.
Historically, precursors of this train of thought can be found in Descartes’ Genius malignus arguments, cf. Descartes 1996a, 1st Meditation, pp. 17–23, and ancient scepticism. Stanford 2017 finds a first reference to the underdetermination of scientific hypotheses in Mill 1867–1900, p. 328, but the locus classicus remains Duhem 1914.
- 4.
Cf. Quine 1969a, p. 79. It has not been conclusively proven in the history of philosophy whether Quine developed his underdetermination argument completely independently of Duhem or not.
- 5.
For an argument against Fine’s take, cf. Lipton 2004.
- 6.
Fine attempts to conceptualise this fictionalist instrumentalism not as anti-realism, but in line with the natural ontological attitude. Cf. on this Fine 1986b, p. 9 and on the variant of the counter-argument pp. 114–117. I cannot elaborate here why I think that this leads to an ontological anti-realism in my sense. The same holds in my opinion for Mauricio Suárez proposal Suárez 2010, esp. p. 225, of stating a broad fictionalism about models and general scientific discourse as neutral with regard to scientific realism, as Gentile and Lucero 2024 convincingly show.
- 7.
Goodman 1983, gives the well-known argument that the evidence supports the conclusion “that all emeralds are grue”, p. 74.
- 8.
Cf. for this conclusion, see also the critical analysis of the bad-lot argument in the variants of van Fraassen and Wray in Mizrahi 2013a.
- 9.
For an application of UTE in relation to quantum physics, cf. Egg and Saatsi 2021.
- 10.
I analyse this argument in detail as an objection to the structural thesis of OSR in my Sect. 5.3.4, pp. 151–156.
- 11.
In Feyerabend’s case, it is unclear if his incommensurability argument is directed against realism, as he is sometime interpreted as a realist. Cf. Crull 2024.
- 12.
That contemporary physicist tend towards scientific realism with regard to their current foundational theories is empirically suggested in Henne et al. 2024.
- 13.
I would like to thank Jens Rometsch for this further objection and the invitation to take a harder look at Kuhn here.
- 14.
For forty years now, there has been an ongoing debate as to whether all entries on Laudan’s list are justified. A relevant extension and improvement of the list was proposed in Vickers 2013, esp. pp. 191–194 criticism of this is expressed, for example, by Mizrahi 2016; for a current overview of the debate, see Lyons and Vickers 2021.
- 15.
The word “necessarily” can be read here in the sense of causal, natural law, logical or ontological necessity, the negative conclusion should apply in all cases according to the argument.
- 16.
Mizrahi even wants to show that all deductive formulations of PMI fail completely and that they too must be abandoned. But Mizrahi’s counterarguments, e.g. in Mizrahi 2013b, pp. 3211–3216, show this only for strong variants of these PMI arguments. I therefore consider the more limited successes of PMI, which I emphasise in the next section, to be justified by the two variants reconstructed in this section. Cf. also Lyons 2013, 2017; Cf. for Mizrahi’s own view Mizrahi 2020, 2021.
- 17.
Cf. e.g. the evolutionary explanation for success in van Fraassen 1980, pp. 39–41, esp. p. 40: “I claim that the success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive—the ones which in fact latched on to actual regularities in nature.” For an overview of the convincing arguments that the evolutionary explanation and realism are not alternative in any meaning full way for the debate cf. Park 2022b.
- 18.
I will not reproduce the long and cumbersome debate on the many no-miracle arguments here, since my variant of the argument fulfils the requirement of a motivation for scientific realism without wanting to justify it strictly. My form of the argument follows directly from the critique of the famous versions by Smart (and Boyd), which I discussed on p. 112 of this book, and that of Putnam, on which my variant is based.
- 19.
- 20.
Timothy Lyons offers a reconstruction of this argument in which it is a deductively valid modus ponens argument with some empirical premises that are themselves only inductively justified Lyons 2013, p. 372.
- 21.
- 22.
Cf. my presentation of Chakravartty’s critique of entity realism in Sect. 5.1.5, p. 120.
- 23.
- 24.
Cf. the last Sect. 5.1.5 of the previous subchapter, p. 122.
- 25.
- 26.
I would like to thank Jens Rometsch for criticising this passage, which has given rise to clarification.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
Gabriel’s ontology of fields of sense argues that this is not only an epistemological necessity, but an ontological necessity without which no entity (no object in Gabriel’s vocabulary) can exist. For him, to exist means to appear in a field of sense.
- 31.
- 32.
This does not apply the other way round: Rovane shows in Rovane 2013, pp. 85–88 and elsewhere that unimundialism does not imply realism, if only because a single world is conceivable that is dependent on subjects as in subjective idealism.
- 33.
Although she did so at the time of the original development of the argument according to her own statement; however, later, without changing the argument, Cartwright co-developed entity realism.
- 34.
- 35.
Cf. Sect. 5.1.5 of the present book, p. 120.
- 36.
Cartwright supplements this argument in several works with further arguments, which I will not go into here for reasons of brevity. They include the argument that in practice phenomenal laws are not derived from fundamental laws of nature, and in this sense the former are not special cases of the latter. Also, Cartwright’s alternative understanding of models and the insight that fundamental laws of nature are a heuristic in the process of searching for suitable models rather than anything else can also be understood as an argument in favour of an epistemological anti-realism of an instrumentalist kind with regard to fundamental laws of nature. Cf. on the main argument reproduced here in particular Cartwright 1983, Essay 2 & 3, pp. 44–73.
- 37.
Cf. also for the following Cartwright 1983, pp. 56–58. Cartwright also discusses several examples from quantum physics. Those theories can be considered more up to date (though her original contribution is from 1983), but the mathematics of which should not be assumed here for reasons of broad accessibility. I thus remain in the simpler Newtonian mechanics.
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
- 41.
Worrall refers to passages such as this in Poincaré 2018, p. 115: “The equations express relations and if these equations remain true, it is because the relations preserve their reality. Now as before, they teach us that there is a particular relationship between something and something else. We formerly called this something motion and we now call it electric current, but these labels were only images standing in for the real objects that nature forever hides from us. The true relations between these real objects are the only reality we can reach, the only condition being that the relations between the objects are the same as those between the images standing in for the objects. It does not matter whether we find it useful to replace one image by another, as long as these relations are known to us.”
- 42.
- 43.
All such passages in which I go into specifics are explicitly labelled.
- 44.
Other alternatives as in Esfeld 2004, 2009, 2017; Esfeld and Lam 2008, 2011; Lam 2017; Lam and Esfeld 2012 attempt a more moderate form of OntSR, but fall back into a classic OSR with objects, which in my view has no obvious advantage over Chakravartty’s semirealism as far as the debate analysed here is concerned. The same applies to Floridi 2008. For a critique of Esfeld and Lam’s moderate OntSR cf. Busch 2003; French 2014, pp. 178–181 and pp. 231–254 as well as Ladyman 2020. I therefore postpone consideration of the moderate OntSR in this book.
- 45.
I thank Alex Englander for pointing out that there is a proximity to the approaches of German idealism here, which also explains why French explicitly distinguishes himself from information idealisms such as that of Tegmark 2007 or Floridi 2008, which also—consciously or unconsciously—choose similar philosophical approaches to German idealism. For criticism of Floridi’s position as incompatible with scientific realism cf. Wheeler 2022.
- 46.
For the sake of brevity, I will leave out the subsequent critique of French on the notion of “theory” in philosophy of science from his standpoint of OntSR, as OntSR must first be defended in order to arrive at his genuine proposal for theories, even though some of the criticism of the notion remains valid regardless of one’s position on OntSR; cf. French 2020, 2024a.
- 47.
This arguably also does not change with assuming a “math-first” structural realism as proposed in Wallace 2022.
- 48.
Whereby the last contribution does not correspond to the current one in Tahko and Lowe 2020.
- 49.
Though this argument is itself target of different criticism, cf. Luty 2024, which I take to be only partially successfull and therefore set aside here.
- 50.
He also argues that the motivation (metaphysical underdetermination of quantum objects as well as a response to UTE and historical arguments) is not sufficient to abandon all objects in ontology cf. Chakravartty 2003, p. 871.
- 51.
I could further try to show at this point that French represents a reductive naturalism in my definition, which runs into the difficulties already outlined. Since the weaker thesis of OntSR as an OSR is sufficient for my conclusion, I will skip this step.
- 52.
- 53.
Paul Hoyningen-Huene notes that it is not always possible to determine unambiguously which structure is described by a given physical theory (cf. Hoyningen-Huene 2012, here p. 185–186). The problem that arises here is the impossibility of categorising what the fundamental structure of a particular theory is if only the purely mathematical-formal apparatus is considered, without presupposing an overall metaphysical structure including objects. For example, what is the structure of Maxwell’s field theory of electrodynamics? How can a series of linear partial differential equations describe a single physical structure, without resorting interpretatively to objects?
- 54.
Additionally, one can formulate a regress argument different from Wolff’s criticism according to Cumpa 2023, but I will leave this aside.
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Voosholz, J. (2025). The Double Stalemate of Objective Scientific Realism. In: Towards a New Scientific Realism. Synthese Library, vol 518. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98886-8_5
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