Contemporary philosophers call this conceptual analysis and it’s exactly how they talk about scientific realism and anti-realism. Your answer to the question, that X is real if it can be included as part of a coherent whole with the rest of science is vaguely Quinean.
Contemporary philosophers call this conceptual analysis and it’s exactly how they talk about scientific realism and anti-realism. Your answer to the question, that X is real if it can be included as part of a coherent whole with the rest of science is vaguely Quinean.
I agree with the resemblance to Quine; it could also be thought of as Philip Kitcher’s “unification” model of explanation.
And also the coherence theory of truth (replace “X is real” with ” ‘X exists’ is true”).