Critical Scientific Realism (Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy)

This book is two things, a survey of philosophical positions and a polemic in favor of one of them. The positions surveyed are the many varieties of subjectivism and realism; the polemic is in favor of the form of realism known as "scientific realism." Scientific realism is the view that there is a mind-independent real world which we cannot know perfectly or exhaustively, but which we can know to an increasingly good approximation. The alternatives are one or another form of subjectivism (there is no reality independent of mind), or relativism (my truth vs. your truth), or some theory of truth other than as correspondence between reality and our verbal descriptions of it. The survey is downright masterful, but is the polemic convincing? Yes, I think it is. Every alternative to scientific realism faces the test of explaining, under its own ontological and epistemological assumptions, how it possibly can be that science so demonstrably succeeds in providing a progressively more truthlike account of the world and how it works. Every alternative resoundingly flunks that test. Game, set, match, and time to move on. Fortunately, working scientists themselves have never wasted much time worrying about the alternatives to scientific realism, being far too busy doing the work it takes to provide that progressively more truthlike account, and the vast benefits to human well-being that have followed from it. Terrific book, very highly recommended.