Structuralism as a Stance

I argue that considerations analogous to those van Fraassen raises in connection with physicalism support regarding ontic structural realism as a stance also. Like physicalists, structuralists prescind from defining structure too carefully, in large part because they want the notion of structure to be open to future scientific developments. And structuralists have also allowed the term ‘structure’ to come to cover aspects of the world they themselves previously presented as antithetical. For these reasons, I propose that rather than a doctrine about how the world fundamentally is, structuralism should be viewed as a kind of stance.