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Concept
Scientific realism
Summary
Scientific realism is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted.
Within philosophy of science, this view is often an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The discussion on the success of science in this context centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories. Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables, as opposed to instrumentalism.
Scientific realism involves two basic positions:
First, it is a set of claims about the features of an ideal scientific theory; an ideal theory is the sort of theory science aims to produce.
Second, it is the commitment that science will eventually produce theories very much like an ideal theory and that science has done pretty well thus far in some domains. It is important to note that one might be a scientific realist regarding some sciences while not being a realist regarding others.
According to scientific realism, an ideal scientific theory has the following features:
The claims the theory makes are either true or false, depending on whether the entities talked about by the theory exist and are correctly described by the theory. This is the semantic commitment of scientific realism.
The entities described by the scientific theory exist objectively and mind-independently. This is the metaphysical commitment of scientific realism.
There are reasons to believe some significant portion of what the theory says. This is the epistemological commitment.
Combining the first and the second claim entails that an ideal scientific theory says definite things about genuinely existing entities. The third claim says that we have reasons to believe that many scientific claims about these entities are true, but not all.
Scientific realism usually holds that science makes progress, i.e.
Official source
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