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6 interesting facts about radium1/29/2024 ![]() ![]() Plausibly, the concepts of entities sometimes undergo a change with respect to their status in a theory once theoretical or empirical progress is made. When I talk about the conceptual changes of an entity it should be understood as changes in the scientist’s conception or characterization of the entity, not as a change in the entity itself. I do not mean to say that a conceptual change physically or metaphysically alters or impacts the entity in any way, shape, or form. When I refer to ‘conceptual changes’ I mean the characterization or understanding of the entity from the scientist’s perspective. In this paper, I address an overlooked issue that has bearing on both these points of dispute-that the concept of an entity can change during the different stages of the scientific process. One can see why this demand has been hard to meet. Anti-realists, in the form of empiricists, demand observable confirmation of the reliability of IBE when applied to unobservables. ![]() The core to this dispute resides in the fact that realists struggle to convince anti-realists that IBE is reliable on anti-realist terms. Realists have on their part provided various strategies in favor of IBE including explanatory defenses by Boyd ( 1983) and Psillos ( 1999 2007), as well as inductive defenses from Kitcher ( 2001), Douven ( 2002) and Bird ( 2006). This form of inference has been argued to be unjustified by virtue of vicious circularity (Fine 1991), and on the grounds that it fails to transmit warrant to the selected theory because of underdetermination (Stanford 2006). The core of the debate is whether or not the conditions for explanatory inference set up by the realist only capture the entities (or structures, if you are a structural realist) that have been retained, or the abandoned ones as well.Īnother point of dispute is the reliability of explanatory reasoning in general, or the legitimacy of reasoning in accordance with inference to the best explanation (IBE). ![]() ![]() Thus, the realist concludes, we can be realists about these entities. The shift in focus from whole theories and empirical success to parts of theories and predictive success filters out many of Laudan’s counterexamples and promises the inverse result: theoretical entities that satisfy these conditions of indispensability for predictive success have not been abandoned, but rather retained in the scientific image during theory-change, and are therefore likely to remain in our future scientific image. In response to Laudan’s argument, contemporary versions of selective realism, for example the ‘Divide et Impera’ realism advocated by Psillos ( 1999), and the ‘working posit’ realism forwarded by Kitcher ( 1995), argued that we can infer the existence of theoretical entities posited in science in so far as they are indispensable for a theory’s predictive success. Entities postulated in empirically successful but false theories-phlogiston, ether or crystalline spheres-were abandoned as science progressed. In a seminal paper against scientific realism, Laudan ( 1981) showed that scientific theories could be empirically successful and yet still be false, breaking the essential explanatory connection between empirical success and truth. One of them concerns the claim that theoretical content from past empirically successful theories is retained in current theory. There are many points of dispute in the debate between scientific realists and anti-realists. ![]()
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