Stathis Psillos

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 is any attempt to begin with empiricist premises and reach a sustainable realist position. (It has been advocated by Russell, Weyl, and Maxwell among others.) The downward path is any attempt to start from realist premises and construct a weaker realist position. (It has been recently advocated by Worrall, French, and Ladyman.) This paper unravels and criticizes the metaphysical presuppositions of both paths to SR. It questions its very possibility as a substantive-and viable-realist thesis.

The Structure, the Whole Structure, and Nothing but the Structure?

This paper is structured around the three elements of the title. Section 2 claims that (a) structures need objects and (b) scientific structuralism should focus on in re structures. Therefore, pure structuralism is undermined. Section 3 discusses whether the world has ‘excess structure’ over the structure of appearances. The main point is that the claim that only structure can be known is false. Finally, Section 4 argues directly against ontic structural realism that it lacks the resources to accommodate causation within its structuralist slogan.

A Glimpse of the Secret Connexion: Harmonizing Mechanisms with Counterfactuals

Among the current philosophical accounts of causation two are the most prominent. The first is James Woodwards interventionist counterfactual approach; the second is the mechanistic approach advocated by Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, Carl Craver, Jim Bogen and Stuart Glennan. The counterfactual approach takes it that causes make a difference to their effects, where this difference-making is cashed out in terms of actual and counterfactual interventions. The mechanistic approach takes it that two events are causally related if and only if there is a mechanism that connects them. In this paper I examine them both in some detail. After pointing out some important problems that both approaches face, I argue that there is a sense in which the counterfactual approach is more basic than the mechanistic one in that a proper account of mechanisms depends on counterfactuals while counterfactuals need not be supported (or depend on) mechanisms. Nonetheless, I also argue that if both approaches work in tandem in practice, they can offer us a better understanding of aspects of Humes secret connexion and hence a glimpse of it.

The Present State of the Scientific Realism Debate

Once upon a time there was a feeling in the philosophy of science community that the scientific realism debate had run out of steam. Arthur Fine went as far as to declare that ‘realism is well and truly dead’ (1986a, 112) and to compose the obituary of the debate, aka the Natural Ontological Attitude. Fortunately, the allegations of premature death failed to persuade many philosophers, for whom the scientific realism debate has had a glorious past and a very promising future. In the last dozen of years only there have been a number of books which cast a fresh eye over the issue of scientific realism, such as those by Suppe (1989), Putnam (1990), Almeder (1992), Wright (1992), Kitcher (1993a), Aronson, Harre & Way (1994), Brown (1994), Laudan (1996), Leplin (1997), Kukla (1998), Trout (1998), Cartwright (1999), Giere (1999), Niiniluoto (1999) and Psillos (1999). Although these books differ vastly in their approaches and in their substantive theses, they can all be seen as participating in a common project: to characterise carefully the main features of the realism debate and to offer new ways of either exploring old arguments or thinking in novel terms about the debate itself.

Rudolf Carnap's `Theoretical Concepts in Science'

Rudolf Carnap delivered the hitherto unpublished lecture ‘Theoretical Concepts in Science’ at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, at Santa Barbara, California, on 29 December 1959. It was part of a symposium on ‘Carnap’s views on Theoretical Concepts in Science’. In the bibliography that appears in the end of the volume, ‘The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap’, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, a revised version of this address appears to be among Carnap’s forthcoming papers. But although Carnap started to revise it, he never finished the revision, 1 and never published the unrevised transcript. Perhaps this is because variants of the approach to theoretical concepts presented for the first time in the Santa Barbara lecture have appeared in other papers of his (cf. the editorial footnotes in Carnap’s lecture). Still, I think, the Santa Barbara address is a little philosophical gem that needs to see the light of day. The document that follows is the unrevised transcript of Carnap’s lecture. 2 Its style, then, is that of an oral presentation. I decided to leave it as it is, making only very minor stylistic changes—which, except those related to punctuation, are indicated by curly brackets. I think that reading this lecture is a rewarding experience, punctuated as the lecture is with odd remarks and autobiographical points. One can almost envisage

A philosophical study of the transition from the caloric theory of heat to thermodynamics: Resisting the pessimistic meta-induction

Abstract I began this study with Laudans argument from the pessimistic induction and I promised to show that the caloric theory of heat cannot be used to support the premisses of the meta-induction on past scientific theories. I tried to show that the laws of experimental calorimetry, adiabatic change and Carnots theory of the motive power of heat were (i) independent of the assumption that heat is a material substance, (ii) approximately true, (iii) deducible and accounted for within thermodynamics. I stressed that results (i) and (ii) were known to most theorists of the caloric theory and that result (iii) was put forward by the founders of the new thermodynamics. In other words, the truth-content of the caloric theory was located, selected carefully, and preserved by the founders of thermodynamics. However, the reader might think that even if I have succeeded in showing that laudan is wrong about the caloric theory, I have not shown how the strategy followed in this paper can be generalised against the pessimistic meta-induction. I think that the general strategy against Laudans argument suggested in this paper is this: the empirical success of a mature scientific theory suggests that there are respects and degrees in which this theory is true. The difficulty for — and and real challenge to — philosophers of science is to suggest ways in which this truth-content can be located and shown to be preserved — if at all — to subsequent theories. In particular, the empirical success of a theory does not, automatically, suggest that all theoretical terms of the theory refer. On the contrary, judgments of referential success depend on which theoretical claims are well-supported by the evidence. This is a matter of specific investigation. Generally, one would expect that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence or turn out to be independent of the evidence at hand, are not compelling. For simply, if the evidence does not make it likely that our beliefs about putative theoretical entities are approximately correct, a belief in those entities would be ill-founded and unjustified. Theoretical extrapolations in science are indespensable , but they are not arbitrary. If the evidence does not warrant them I do not see why someone should commit herself to them. In a sense, the problem with empricist philisophers is not that they demand that theoretical beliefs must be warranted by evidence. Rather, it is that they claim that no evidence can warrant theorretical beliefs. A realist philosopher of science would not disagree on the first, but she has good grounds to deny the second. I argued that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence must not be taken as belief-worthy. But can one sustaon the more ambitious view that loosely supported parts of a theory tend to be just those that include non-referring terms? There is an obvious excess risk in such a generalisation. For there are well-known cases in which a theoretical claim was initially weakly supported by the evidence

TheStructure, theWholeStructure, and Nothingbutthe Structure?

This paper is structured around the three elements of the title. Section 2 claims that (a) structures need objects and (b) scientific structuralism should focus on in re structures. Therefore, pure structuralism is undermined. Section 3 discusses whether the world has ‘excess structure’ over the structure of appearances. The main point is that the claim that only structure can be known is false. Finally, Section 4 argues directly against ontic structural realism that it lacks the resources to accommodate causation within its structuralist slogan.

An Explorer upon Untrodden Ground: Peirce on Abduction

Publisher Summary Peirce stated that the three basic, irreducible, and indispensable forms of reasoning include deduction, induction, and abduction. Abduction consists of studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. It is essentially a process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. Abduction is the only kind of reasoning by means of which new ideas can be introduced. This chapter describes the philosophical view of Peirces abduction. It illustrates Peirces account of ideas taken from Kant and Aristotle. The chapter also presents Peirces own two-dimensional framework for the study of reasoning and sets out Peirces key aim including the study of the mode of reasoning that is both ampliative and generative of new content. It explains Peirces early syllogistic approach to inference and discusses the division of ampliative reasoning into hypothesis and induction. It focuses on the issue of the legitimacy of abduction qua mode of reasoning and also relates Peirces conception of inquiry as a three-stage project that brings together all three basic and ineliminable modes of reasoning.

Living with the abstract: realism and models

A natural way to think of models is as abstract entities. If theories employ models to represent the world, theories traffic in abstract entities much more widely than is often assumed. This kind of thought seems to create a problem for a scientific realist approach to theories. Scientific realists claim theories should be understood literally. Do they then imply (and are they committed to) the reality of abstract entities? Or are theories simply—and incurably—false (if there are no abstract entities)? Or has the very idea of literal understanding to be abandoned? Is then fictionalism towards scientific theories inevitable? This paper argues that scientific realism can happily co-exist with models qua abstracta.

Thinking About the Ultimate Argument for Realism

The title of this chapter alludes to Musgrave’s piece ‘The Ultimate Argument for Realism’, though the expression is van Fraassen’s (1980, 39), and the argument is Putnam’s (1975, 73): realism ‘is the only philosophy of science that does not make the success of science a miracle’. Hence, the code name ‘no-miracles’ argument (henceforth, NMA). The NMA has quite a history and a variety of formulations. I have documented all this in my work (Psillos 1999, Chapter 4). No matter how exactly the argument is presented, its thrust is that the success of scientific theories lends credence to the following two theses: (a) scientific theories should be interpreted realistically and (b) so interpreted, these theories are approximately true. The original authors of the argument, however, did not put an extra stress on novel predictions, which, as Musgrave (1988) makes plain, is the litmus test for the ability of any approach to science to explain the success of science.