Abstract
An epistemic stance is an attitude or orientation of an agent that determines whether or not that agent’s evidence justifies their claims to know. Stances have been thought to involve debatable policies, values, and aims that distinguish, for example, the scientific realist from the anti-realist. This symposium will consider how those sympathetic to scientific realism and scientific metaphysics should conceive of these stances. If a stance is necessary to defend one’s claims to know about unobservable entities of various kinds, should the realist admit the possibility of other, non-realist stances? If so, how should a realist stance be motivated and defended? The four contributors to this symposium provide four different answers to these questions and their relevance to broader issues in the philosophy of science, including rationality, evidence, explanation, and mathematical structure.
