Other: the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism is mostly meaningless. If a scientific theory makes claims about “unobservable entities” (not sure what exactly it means), either these claims are logically entangled with testable claims that have been experimentally verified and then the reasons to believe in them are as good as the reasons to believe the verified claims (supposedly about “observable objects”) or these claims are independent of the rest of the theory and presumably untestable, which means that the theory is un-Occamian and shouldn’t be considered good scientific theory.
I think you’ve given a good example of why this question is so problematic, because what prase said sounds more like anti-realism to me. Though mostly my view is that the more you try to figure out what “realism” could mean, the less sure you will be about it; I picked “lean anti-realism” myself because I think “realism” is shorthand for a huge bundle of claims that really should be unbundled and evaluated separately.
I picked “lean anti-realism” myself because I think “realism” is shorthand for a huge bundle of claims that really should be unbundled and evaluated separately.
As befits your handle! I took Prase to be a realist because he said that when a good scientific theory posits an unobservable entity which has such and such observable effects on observable entities, we have as much reason to believe in the unobservable entities as we do in the observable effects. That struck me as realism because it’s a view on which the unobservable apparatus of scientific theoryies are taken to be real (in whatever sense observable things are so taken).
Other: the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism is mostly meaningless. If a scientific theory makes claims about “unobservable entities” (not sure what exactly it means), either these claims are logically entangled with testable claims that have been experimentally verified and then the reasons to believe in them are as good as the reasons to believe the verified claims (supposedly about “observable objects”) or these claims are independent of the rest of the theory and presumably untestable, which means that the theory is un-Occamian and shouldn’t be considered good scientific theory.
I think that’s just realism.
I think you’ve given a good example of why this question is so problematic, because what prase said sounds more like anti-realism to me. Though mostly my view is that the more you try to figure out what “realism” could mean, the less sure you will be about it; I picked “lean anti-realism” myself because I think “realism” is shorthand for a huge bundle of claims that really should be unbundled and evaluated separately.
As befits your handle! I took Prase to be a realist because he said that when a good scientific theory posits an unobservable entity which has such and such observable effects on observable entities, we have as much reason to believe in the unobservable entities as we do in the observable effects. That struck me as realism because it’s a view on which the unobservable apparatus of scientific theoryies are taken to be real (in whatever sense observable things are so taken).