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One of the core charges against explanationist scientific realism is that is too epistemically optimistic. Taking the charge seriously, alternative forms of scientific realism -- semi-realism and theoretical irrealism -- are designed to be more modest in their epistemic claims. I consider two cases ...

My re-conception of realism is based on new pragmatist notions of knowledge, truth and reality, which are elaborated in the forthcoming book Realism for Realistic People. These notions are designed for better understanding and facilitation of scientific and quotidian practices. I focus on “active ...

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. ...

The way that I seek to redirect the realism debate is away from the question of the reality of unobservable posits of scientific theories and models, and towards the question of whether those theories and models should be interpreted realistically. This makes it easier to include within the realism ...

My aim in this paper will be to explore which deeper and more general epistemic stances underlie methodological naturalism. In particular, I aim to consider whether the same epistemic stance that underlies scientific realism must also underlie methodological naturalism. Since it is often assumed tha...

The debate on realism concerning science is one of the oldest and perennial topics in philosophy of science. Yet the debate has increasingly reached a stand-off with often diminished returns. In recent years there has been renewed attention to realism with an eye to re-assessing the nature of the co...

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 ...

Motivated by a desire to make precise the position of structural realism, David Wallace recently articulated a framework for understanding the relationship between metaphysical and scientific theories. In this paper, I demonstrate two particularly significant consequences of this framework for the m...

I argue that realism requires a stance, but that the realist should maintain that their stance is the only rationally permissible one. The basic motivation for maintaining that only a realist stance is rationally permissible is that being more open-minded induces a kind of pragmatic incoherence on t...

In Identifying Future-Proof Science (OUP 2022) I argue that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever (so long as science continues). Examples include the evolution of human beings from fish, the fact that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, and â...

In this talk, I attend to three main tasks. First, I locate the main rationale for my perspectival realism in what I call historical naturalism (drawing on Massimi 2022, Ch 8). I argue that our realist commitments originate from a thoroughgoing naturalistic stance. However, by contrast with classica...

Epistemic stances are collections of attitudes, values, aims, and policies relevant to assessing evidence, eventuating in belief or agnosticism in relation to scientific theories and models. If more than one stance is permissible, this would seem to undermine certain debates between scientific reali...

Certain philosophers claim the No-Miracles Argument (NMA) for realism commits the base-rate neglect fallacy. I argue that it does not. In general, one commits a base-rate fallacy only when one has access to the relevant base rate. And in the case of scientific realism, we lack access to the relevant...