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Favorite EditSanction this itemA Metaphysics for Scientific Realism by Anjan Chakravartty
A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism
Sweeping, Informed, Bravo!


A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism
Knowing the Unobservable
Anjan Chakravartty
(Cambridge University Press 2007)

From the Table of Contents:

Part I   Scientific realism today

1  Realism and antirealism; metaphysics and empiricism
     1.1  The trouble with common sense
     1.2  A conceptual taxonomy
     1.3  Metaphysics, empiricism, and scientific knowledge
     1.4  The rise of stance empiricism
     1.5  The fall of the critique of metaphysics

2  Selective skepticism: entity realism, structural realism, semirealism
     2.1  The entities are not alone
     2.2  Lessons from epistemic structuralism
     2.3  Semirealism (or: how to be a sophisticated realist)
     2.4  Optimistic and pessimistic inductions on past science
     2.5  The minimal interpretation of structure

3  Properties, particulars, and concrete structures
     3.1  Inventory: what realists know
     3.2  Mutually entailed particulars and structures
     3.3  Ontic structuralism: farewell to objects?
     3.4  Ontological theory change
     3.5  Return of the motley particulars

Part II  Metaphysical foundations

4  Causal realism and causal processes
     4.1  Causal connections and de re necessity
     4.2  Is causal realism incoherent?
     4.3  A first answer: relations between events
     4.4  A better answer: causal processes
     4.5  Processes for empiricists

5  Dispositions, property identity, and laws of nature
     5.1  The causal property identity thesis
     5.2  Property naming and necessity
     5.3  Objections: epistemic and metaphysical
     5.4  Vacuous laws and the ontology of causal properties
     5.5  Causal laws, ceteris paribus

6  Sociability: natural and scientific kinds
     6.1  Law statements and the role of kinds
     6.2  Essences and clusters: two kinds of kinds
     6.3  Clusters and biological species concepts
     6.4  Sociability (or: how to make kinds with properties)
     6.5  Beyond objectivity, subjectivity, and promiscuity

Part III  Theory meets world

7  Representing and describing: theories and models
     7.1  Descriptions, and non-linguistic representations
     7.2  Representing via abstraction and idealization
     7.3  Extracting information from models
     7.4  The inescapability of correspondence
     7.5  Approximation and geometrical structures

8  Approximate truths about approximate truth
     8.1  Knowledge in the absence of truth simpliciter
     8.2  Measuring “truth-likeness”
     8.3  Truth as a comparator for art and science
     8.4  Depiction versus denotation; description versus reference
     8.5  Products versus production; theories and models versus practice

~~~~~~~~

See also here.


Added by Stephen Boydstun
on 3/09/2008, 7:54am

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