Scientific Realism vs. Anti-Realism: Toward a Common Ground
This work aims to benefit philosophers and scientists by potentially reconciling a foundational debate in philosophy of science, though it appears incremental in exploring common ground rather than resolving the debate.
The paper tackles the stalemate in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism by proposing a common ground that addresses challenges for both sides, such as justifying Ockham's razor and connecting it to truth, leveraging insights from statistics and machine learning.
The debate between scientific realism and anti-realism remains at a stalemate, making reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet, important work remains: exploring a common ground, even if only to uncover deeper points of disagreement and, ideally, to benefit both sides of the debate. I propose such a common ground. Specifically, many anti-realists, such as instrumentalists, have yet to seriously engage with Sober's call to justify their preferred version of Ockham's razor through a positive account. Meanwhile, realists face a similar challenge: providing a non-circular explanation of how their version of Ockham's razor connects to truth. The common ground I propose addresses these challenges for both sides; the key is to leverage the idea that everyone values some truths and to draw on insights from scientific fields that study scientific inference -- namely, statistics and machine learning. This common ground also isolates a distinctively epistemic root of the irreconcilability in the realism debate.