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The Prospective Stance in Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ioannis Votsis
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Abstract

Scientific realists endeavor to secure inferences from empirical success to approximate truth by arguing that, despite the demise of empirically successful theories, the parts of those theories responsible for their success do, in fact, survive theory change. If, as some antirealists have recently suggested, successful theory parts are only identifiable in retrospect, namely, as those that have survived, then the realist approach is trivialized, for now success and survival are guaranteed to coincide. The primary aim of this article is to counter this argument by identifying successful theory parts independently from their survival.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 5 , December 2011 , pp. 1223 - 1234
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) as well as from the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh where, during a visiting fellowship, part of this article was written.

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