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An Antirealist Explanation of the Success of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

P. Kyle Stanford
P. Kyle Stanford*
Affiliation:
Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, Department of Philosophy University of California, Irvine
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Abstract

I develop an account of predictive similarity that allows even Antirealists who accept a correspondence conception of truth to answer the Realist demand (recently given sophisticated reformulations by Musgrave and Leplin) to explain the success of particular scientific theories by appeal to some intrinsic feature of those theories (notwithstanding the failure of past efforts by van Fraassen, Fine, and Laudan). I conclude by arguing that we have no reason to find truth a better (i.e., more plausible) explanation of a theory's success than predictive similarity, even of its success in making novel predictions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 266 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-5100.

‡

Thanks are owed to the members of my Spring 1999 graduate seminar for their input on the argument I present below and to Pen Maddy, Philip Kitcher, two anonymous referees for Philosophy of Science, and especially to Jeff Barrett for their encouragement and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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