Philosophy of Physics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by David Wallace

We have seen that instrumentalists say no: to them, any two theories with the same observational consequences are really the same theory described two different ways. (But we have seen that instrumentalism is not really viable.) Standard scientific realists say yes: according to them, two distinct theories can share the same mathematical structure. Structural scientific realists (or just structuralists) also say no: they hold that two theories with the same mathematical structure are really different descriptions of the same theory. The structuralist approach is closer to the tacit assumptions used in physics, and I mostly adopt it here, but there are many unresolved questions about how it is to be understood and differentiated from the standard approach.

instrumentalism standard scientific realists structural scientific realists