Scientific realism

By Christopher Thielen on April 12, 2011

On the upcoming Episode 42 and in past episodes, I’ve brought up the concept of scientific realism to explain my position on those armchair debates covering free will and wide-reaching questions like, ” What can science tell us about X?” From the Wikipedia article:

Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science, it is often framed as an answer to the question “how is the success of science to be explained?”

Scientific realism is an interesting topic to research if you’re curious about questions such as, “How can we verify this nature of the Universe if our senses cannot be trusted?” or “What does it mean for a theory to be known to be wrong, that is, for its basic assumptions to be demonstrably false, but for its predictions to still hold true?”