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Scientific Realism: Between Platonism and Nominalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Stathis Psillos
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Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the prospects of nominalistic scientific realism (NSR) and show that it fails on many counts. In section 2, I discuss what is required for NSR to get off the ground. In section 3, I question the idea that theories have well-defined nominalistic content and the idea that causal activity is a necessary condition for commitment to the reality of an entity. In section 4, I challenge the notion of nominalistic adequacy of theories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 5 , December 2010 , pp. 947 - 958
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

A longer version of this paper, titled “What If There Are No Mathematical Entities? Lessons for Scientific Realism,” was presented at the Pittsburgh PSA meeting in November 2008 and also at the Universities of Bristol and Muenster. Many thanks to two anonymous readers of Philosophy of Science, Alexander Bird, Richard Boyd, Jim Brown, Geoff Hellman, James Ladyman, Mary Leng, Oystein Linnebo, Oliver Scholz, and Christian Suhm for useful comments. Chris Pincock and Jeff Ketland deserve special thanks for their generous intellectual help and encouragement.

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