UC San Diego

How can a scientific realist answer the critic who claims we should be skeptical of scientific claims because past theories have turned out to be false? Realist arguments have so far failed in all of their responses to this problem. An imaginative answer is Structural Realism. On this approach one takes a realist stance only towards the preserved structure of our best scientific theories. This way we should be able to cease worrying about troublesome ontology such as the luminiferous ether, and have faith that we have captured the correct form of the world. In this dissertation I tease apart four articulations of structural realism, and prove that each fails to answer the problem. Epistemic Structural Realism tells us to believe in the equations retained across theory transitions; we put our faith in low-level mathematical articulations of physical phenomena. The second form is Ramsey-Sentence Realism, which suggests we believe only in the Ramsey-Sentences of our best theories, for that is where their confirmed cognitive content lies. Third, Partial-Structures Realism, appeals to the invariant set- theoretic structure of our theories. Lastly, there is a view called Semirealism, which advises we believe only in the structurally represented detection properties of our theories; a position relying heavily on the notion of causal interactions being reliably detectable. In each case I precisely explain these various notions of structure. Once this is done I show that each faces a trilemma: (1) collapse into empiricism, (2) collapse into full-blown scientific realism, or (3) hold such an abstract position as to become trivial. None of these alternatives is attractive because none of them justify a realist response to the initial problem. I conclude that securing a realist answer to the history of science requires an appreciation of the heterogeneous nature of correspondence relations between theories and that only by appeal to a pluralist interpretation of the Correspondence Principle can we hope to save the scientific realism