The Truth of Theories and Scientific Realism

Abstract

The thesis maintained in this paper is that scientific anti-realism was the consequence of having lost the confidence in the capability of science to attain truth, something that historically occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the requirement of truth was removed from science and replaced by the requirement of objectivity. This has a ‘weak’ sense, according to which scientific knowledge is ‘independent of the single subjects’ (intersubjectivity) In addition, however, every science is considered to investigate not reality in general, but only its specific objects (‘strong’ ontological sense of objectivity). These specific objects are ‘clipped out’ of the reality of common sense ‘things’ by considering them from a specific point of view focusing only on certain attributes of reality. In order to determine these clips, the scientific community elaborates certain standardized operational procedures for establishing whether certain statements regarding things are immediately true or false. In such a way these operational procedures are ‘criteria of reference’ and ‘criteria of truth’ for a given science, and moreover turn out to be the same used for securing objectivity in the weak sense. This amounts to recovering the characteristic of truth for scientific knowledge, and giving it a realist interpretation both ontologically and epistemologically, at least for its empirically testable statements. The contemporary struggle about realism, however, regards the unobservable entities introduced in scientific theories, and the strategy proposed in the present paper is that of suitably ‘extending’ to theories the notion of truth, which is immediately and directly defined for single declarative statements. From the referential nature of truth follows that if we have reasons for admitting the truth of a theory, we must also admit, for the same reasons, the existence of its referents, even when they are unobservable entities.