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Read the attached source material and write THREE discussion responses, at least FIFTY words for each response.
Your THREE required posts can be any of the following types:
1. A direct response to the prompt posted by the instructor to help guide discussion.
2. A substantive original comment or question on the course material for the week.
3. A substantive original reply to any other post.
THREE required posts can be any of the following types:
1. A direct response to the prompt posted by the instructor to help guide discussion.
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The realism debate in 20th-century analytic philosophy of science is classically about the observable/unobservable distinction, whether such a distinction can be drawn, and what the import of such a distinction might be. It isn’t just about seeing with our eyes, but rather about sensing with our senses generally speaking. Realists classically argue that what science says about what we in principle cannot see is just as realistic as the part of science which is about things we can in fact see. In other words, realists think that we should believe in what science says about what is going on beneath the visible surface. Note that this seems to be a large part of the task of science, to explain what is going on beneath the surface, indeed at the very bottom if possible.
The anti-realist in some way or another denies that what science says about what we are in principle incapable of observing is to be taken as seriously as what science says about what we can observe. So the anti-realist discounts talk about what we cannot see in some way. One way would be to say that sentences involving terms which are supposed to refer to unobservable entities are not literally true or false. Another way would be to say that while they are literally true or false, we should withhold belief in the “unobservable” part of our theory–we should instead remain agnostic, we should say that what science says about the smallest microphysical particles (for instance) is a useful fiction. It is useful in that it allows us to make predictions about things that we can observe. It is a fiction because in order to accept the scientific theory, we do not need to believe that what it says about the unobservable realm is actually true. This is Bas van Fraassen’s view, in a nutshell. He thinks that all we need to commit ourselves to when we accept a scientific theory is that what the theory says about what is observable is true. Such a theory he says is “empirically adequate.”
1. A common argument for scientific realism is: The best explanation for the success of science, the ability of science to correctly predict what will happen, is that what science says about what is unobservable is actually true. Thus, we should infer from the success of science that what it says is true (all of it, about what is observable and about what is unobservable). Do you think that the success of science is best explained by the truth of our scientific theories? What about van Fraassen’s alternative explanation: Science is successful because it is empirically adequate?
2. van Fraassen discusses the philosopher Grover Maxwell’s argument against the importance of the observable/unobservable distinction. Maxwell says that the distinction can’t be important to our ontology (what we think exists) because whether something exists has nothing to do with whether it is observable or not. He goes further and has us imagine a continuum of observability: seeing something with the naked eye, seeing something through through a window, seeing something through a telescope, and so on, and then claims that any particular cutoff between being observable and being unobservable would be arbitrarily drawn. But surely, he suggests, whether something exists or not is not an arbitrary matter for us to decide, so the whole debate is supposed to collapse. van Fraassen responds that while Maxwell is surely correct to say that things do not depend for their existence on our ability to see them, and so the distinction has no ontological import, the distinction does indeed have epistemological import given that what we are justified in believing is intimately connected to the kind of evidence that we can attain. What do you think of that response? What merit is there in Maxwell’s point about the seeming arbitrariness of a definite line being drawn between what counts as observable and what counts as unobservable?
