Scientific Realism: A Defence

In the present chapter, I propose a way of defending epistemological scientific realism that differs from the usual explanationist strategies. Instead of developing a top-down explanatory argumentation which consists in evaluating the merits of several explanations of phenomena and then claim that the loveliest explanation is likely to be true, I offer a bottom-up inductivist strategy which starts from observations to go back to the causes that produce them, which can then be claimed to have been detected. I contend that this bottom-up approach is not vulnerable to the objections raised against inference to the best explanation (IBE). To illustrate this point I argue that the celebrated arguments for the existence of Neptune by Le Verrier and the reality of atoms by Perrin are convincing precisely because they implement such a bottom-up strategy. In addition, I attempt to show that this defence of scientific realism makes it possible to respond to the classical underdetermination objection according to which theories are undetermined by the available data. I also criticize the famous antirealist argument developed by Larry Laudan and known as the historical pessimistic meta-induction. I also show that the stability of reference of terms which denote detected entities can be preserved in spite of important theory changes. To do this, I adopt a causal descriptivist conception of reference based the works of Saul Kripke, David Lewis and Robert Nola and I apply it to the case of the electron.