Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable Book

List of tables     ix
List of figures     x
Preface     xi
List of abbreviations     xvii
Scientific realism today
Realism and antirealism; metaphysics and empiricism     3
The trouble with common sense     3
A conceptual taxonomy     8
Metaphysics, empiricism, and scientific knowledge     13
The rise of stance empiricism     17
The fall of the critique of metaphysics     20
Selective scepticism: entity realism, structural realism, semirealism     27
The entities are not alone     27
Lessons from epistemic structuralism     33
Semirealism (or: how to be a sophisticated realist)     39
Optimistic and pessimistic inductions on past science     45
The minimal interpretation of structure     52
Properties, particulars, and concrete structures     58
Inventory: what realists know     58
Mutually entailed particulars and structures     61
Ontic structuralism: farewell to objects?     70
Ontological theory change     76
Return of the motley particulars     80
Metaphysical foundations
Causal realism and causal processes     89
Causal connections and de renecessity     89
Is causal realism incoherent?     96
A first answer: relations between events     102
A better answer: causal processes     107
Processes for empiricists     114
Dispositions, property identity, and laws of nature     119
The causal property identity thesis     119
Property naming and necessity     126
Objections: epistemic and metaphysical     134
Vacuous laws and the ontology of causal properties     141
Causal laws, ceteris paribus     147
Sociability: natural and scientific kinds     151
Law statements and the role of kinds     151
Essences and clusters: two kinds of kinds     156
Clusters and biological species concepts     162
Sociability (or: how to make kinds with properties)     168
Beyond objectivity, subjectivity, and promiscuity     174
Theory meets world
Representing and describing: theories and models     183
Descriptions and non-linguistic representations     183
Representing via abstraction and idealization     187
Extracting information from models     192
The inescapability of correspondence     199
Approximation and geometrical structures      205
Approximate truths about approximate truth     212
Knowledge in the absence of truth simpliciter     212
Measuring "truth-likeness"     214
Truth as a comparator for art and science     218
Depiction versus denotation; description versus reference     224
Products versus production; theories and models versus practice     230
References     235
Index     244