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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Philosophy of science
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A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism (Hardcover)
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A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism (Hardcover)
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Vigorous and controversial, this book develops a sustained argument
for a realist interpretation of science, based on a new analysis of
the concept of predictive novelty. Identifying a form of success
achieved in science--the successful prediction of novel empirical
results--which can be explained only by attributing some measure of
truth to the theories that yield it, Jarrett Leplin demonstrates
the incapacity of nonrealist accounts to accommodate novel success
and constructs a deft realist explanation of novelty. To test the
applicability of novel success as a standard of warrant for
theories, Leplin examines current directions in theoretical
physics, fashioning a powerful critique of currently developing
standards of evaluation.
Arguing that explanatory uniqueness warrants inference, and
exposing flaws in contending philosophical positions that sever
explanatory power from epistemic justification, Leplin holds that
abductive, or explanatory, inference is as fundamental as
enumerative or eliminative inference, and contends that neither
induction nor abduction can proceed without the other on pain of
generating paradoxes.
Leplin's conception of novelty has two basic components: an
independence condition, ensuring that a result novel for a theory
have no essential role, even indirectly, in the theory's
provenance; and a uniqueness condition, ensuring that no competing
theory provides a basis for predicting the same result. Showing
that alternative approaches to novelty fall short in both respects,
Leplin proceeds to a series of test cases, engaging prominent
scientific theories from nineteenth-century accounts of light to
modern cosmology in an effort to demonstrate theepistemological
superiority of his view.
Ambitious and tightly argued, A Novel Defense of Scientific
Realism advances new positions on major topics in philosophy of
science and offers a version of realism as original as it is
compelling, making it essential reading for philosophers of
science, epistemologists, and scholars in science studies.
General
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