- Title
- The explanatory role of realism
- Creator
- Wright, John
- Relation
- Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel Vol. 29, Issue 1-4, p. 35-56
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02379900
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2002
- Description
- The debate between Realism and anti-Realism is an on-going one in philosophy. One potential way of moving the debate forward would be to find facts that could be explained by one side of the debate but not the other; since a form of evidence for any doctrine is its ability to explain things its rivals cannot. What, if anything, does the hypothesis of Realism explain? An answer sometimes given by Realists is that it explains the success of science. But Hilary Putnam and Simon Blackburn have claimed that this is something that can also be explained without Metaphysical Realism? In this paper it is argued that they are wrong: certain forms of predictive success, termed "novel" predictive success, can only be explained by Realism. Putative explanations of novel success are of two kinds: those that employ the notion of truth ("alethic" explanations) and those that do not (non-alethic explanations). In this paper it is argued that alethic explanations explain novel success only if "true" is given an interpretation available only to the Realist. Non-alethic explanations either fail to explain novel success, or else are implicitly Realist. The conclusion drawn from the paper is that only if we, with the Realist, see truth as non-epistemic can we explain novel success. Some things can only be explained by Realism.
- Subject
- realism; realist; putative; truth; alethic; non-alethic
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/34655
- Identifier
- uon:3635
- Identifier
- ISSN:0048-3893
- Language
- eng
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