Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

It is hard to imagine anyone taking exception to such a principle, so the issue is not joined until Boyd claims that we can only account for this principle’s leading to useful results “on a realistic understanding of the relevant collateral theories”: Suppose you always “guess” where theories are most likely to go wrong experimentally by asking where they are most likely to be false as accounts of causal relations, given the assumption that currently accepted laws represent probable causal knowledge. And suppose your guessing procedure works—that theories really are most likely to go wrong—to yield false experimental predictions—just where a realist would expect them to…. What explanation beside scientific realism is possible? Certainly not the mere effect of conventionally or arbitrarily adopted scientific traditions…. Unless, as no empiricist would suggest, the world is molded by our conventions, there is no way that the reliability of this principle could merely be a matter of convention. (p. 12)

December 2, 2020. Page 283.