Scientific Realism and Naturalistic Epistemology

Abstract

By “scientific realism” philosophers ordinarily mean the doctrine that non-observational terms in scientific theories should typically be interpreted as putative referring expressions, and that when the semantics of theories is understood that way (“realistically“), scientific theories embody the sorts of propositions whose (approximate) truth can be confirmed by the ordinary experimental methods which scientists employ. There are as many possible versions of scientific realism as there are possible accounts of how “theoretical terms” refer and of how the actual methods of science function to produce knowledge. What I will do in this paper is to explore the consequences of one such version of scientific realism, a version which embodies the implicatures as well as the implications of the realist slogan that reality is prior to thought.