Towards a realistic success-to-truth inference for scientific realism

Vickers, P.

doi:10.1007/s11229-016-1150-9

Towards a realistic success-to-truth inference for scientific realism

Vickers, P.

Authors

Professor Peter Vickers peter.vickers@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

A success-to-truth inference has always been at the heart of scientific realist positions. But all attempts to articulate the inference have met with very significant challenges. This paper reconstructs the evolution of this inference, and brings together a number of qualifications in an attempt to articulate a contemporary (‘local’) success-to-truth inference which is realistic. I argue that this contemporary version of the inference has a chance, at least, of overcoming the historical challenges which have been proffered to date (and without moving all the way to structural realism). However, there is a price to pay: the developments which help the realist answer the historical challenges also serve to increase the number of non-historical challenges.

Citation

Vickers, P. (2019). Towards a realistic success-to-truth inference for scientific realism. Synthese, 196(2), 571-585. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1150-9

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 25, 2016
Online Publication Date	Jul 8, 2016
Publication Date	Feb 28, 2019
Deposit Date	Aug 12, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Aug 12, 2016
Journal	Synthese
Print ISSN	0039-7857
Electronic ISSN	1573-0964
Publisher	Springer
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	196
Issue	2
Pages	571-585
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1150-9

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Advance online version © The Author(s) 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.