InthefirstInternationalCongressforScientificPhilosophy.docVIP

How to be a Scientific Realist: A Proposal to Empiricists Stathis Psillos To the memory of Herbert Feigl We are learning to be at home in the world, not by misrepresenting it, but by understanding it. Wendell T. Bush 1923 Introduction What is it to be committed to the reality of the (typically invisible) entities that scientific theories posit to explain the observable phenomena? For the most part, empiricists have felt uncomfortable with this question. With the basic empiricist credo in place, viz., that all substantive knowledge should be grounded in experience, the question above becomes a question about how, if at all, (commitment to) the reality of theoretical entities can be licensed by whatever is given in experience. This is an issue concerning the relation between the entities posited by scientific theory and the data of perception through which they are given; which, of course, is not unresolvable. But isn’t the very idea of the reality of some entities (or of the external world as a whole or whatever) a metaphysical chimera of the sort that empiricists have always shown disdain for? The tension was acutely felt by the Logical Positivists. On the one hand, there is the Scylla of metaphysical realism (at least when it affirms that the reality of theoretical entities is transcendent—disconnected from any possibility of knowing them); on the other hand, there is the Charybdis of instrumentalism (at least when it denies the reality of theoretical posits). The thought, then, that there is a way to reconcile empiricism with a realist stance towards scientific theories, avoiding instrumentalism and without fearing that this will lead straight to metaphysics, becomes very promising. This paper aims to articulate this thought. It revives and develops an empiricist tradition that takes it to be the case that empiricism need not be characterised by ‘phobia of the invisible and the intangible’ as Herbert Feigl once put it—after all, this phobia would be