while there was much they didn’t agree on, a new consensus began to form among professional philosophers of science, a position in opposition to logical positivism, which they called scientific realism. Scientific realism is what it sounds like: the view that there is a real world out there, independent of our observations of it, and that science gives us an approximate description of that world. When a new scientific theory is accepted in place of an old one, this is generally because it gives us a better approximation of the true nature of the world in some important way. This is not to say
...more
