Everything you always wanted to know about structural realism but were afraid to ask

Frigg, Roman; Votsis, Ioannis

doi:10.1007/s13194-011-0025-7

Cited by 103 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 141 publications

(101 reference statements)

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“…Notice that such a description looks remarkably like a Ramsey-sentence, as associated with some versions of epistemic structural realism (for an overview see Frigg and Votsis' (2011)). On this view it's not simply that we don't know about the "nature" of the objects and relations in the world, but we cannot even describe them.…”

Section: A Positive Proposalmentioning

confidence: 97%

Mathematics is not the only language in the book of nature

Nguyen

Frigg

2017

Synthese

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Forthcoming in SyntheseHow does mathematics apply to something non-mathematical? We distinguish between a general application problem and a special application problem. A critical examination of the answer that structural mapping accounts offer to the former problem leads us to identify a lacuna in these accounts: they have to presuppose that target systems are structured and yet leave this presupposition unexplained. We propose to fill this gap with an account that attributes structures to targets through structure generating descriptions. These descriptions are physical descriptions and so there is no such thing as a solely mathematical account of a target system.

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Section: A Positive Proposalmentioning

confidence: 97%

Mathematics is not the only language in the book of nature

Nguyen

Frigg

2017

Synthese

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“…3 Here, the relevant notion of a model is a mathematical structure (i.e., a domain with relations defined upon it) that can be used to represent the unobservable world. 4 To provide dialectical context for the paper, it will be useful to briefly discuss some of the differences between these two approaches.…”

Section: Alternatives To the Ramsey Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…9 3 See, e.g., Ladyman (1998). 4 See Frigg & Votsis (2011, sections 2 and 3.4.2) for discussion. 5 For discussion, see Suppe (1974).…”

Section: Alternatives To the Ramsey Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Newman’s Objection and the No Miracles Argument

Smithson

2016

Erkenn

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“…However, philosophical accounts of scientific realism tend to run into problems when applied to the life sciences. This is in particular true for the currently popular ontic structural realism, according to which all there exists is structure, and continuity in scientific change should be understood as continuity at the level of structure (Frigg and Votsis 2011;Ladyman 2014). For example, Steven French' (2011) discussion of scientific realism in biology merely points towards possible ways in which structural realism could be extended to biology in future work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robust realism for the life sciences

Eronen

2017

Synthese

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Although scientific realism is the default position in the life sciences, philosophical accounts of realism are geared towards physics and run into trouble when applied to fields such as biology or neuroscience. In this paper, I formulate a new robustness-based version of entity realism, and show that it provides a plausible account of realism for the life sciences that is also continuous with scientific practice. It is based on the idea that if there are several independent ways of measuring, detecting or deriving something, then we are justified in believing that it is real. I also consider several possible objections to robustness-based entity realism, discuss its relationship to ontic structural realism, and show how it has the potential to provide a novel response to the pessimistic induction argument.

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Everything you always wanted to know about structural realism but were afraid to ask

Cited by 103 publications

References 141 publications

Mathematics is not the only language in the book of nature

Mathematics is not the only language in the book of nature

Newman’s Objection and the No Miracles Argument

Robust realism for the life sciences

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