Structural Realism or Modal Empiricism?

Structural Realism or Modal Empiricism?

Structural realism has been suggested as the best compromise in the debate on scientific realism. It proposes that we should be realist about the relational structure of the world, not its nature. However it faces an important objection, first raised by Newman against Russell: if relations are not qualified, then the position is either trivial or collapses into empiricism, but if relations are ...

Some Realism About Empiricism

Constructive Empiricism And Modal Nominalism

James Ladyman has argued that constructive empiricism entails modal realism, and that this renders constructive empiricism untenable. We maintain that constructive empiricism is compatible with modal nominalism. Although the central term ‘observable’ has been analyzed in terms of counterfactuals, and in general counterfactuals do not have objective truth conditions, the property of being observ...

Modal Realism with Modal Tense

Modal realists should fashion their theory by postulating and taking seriously the modal equivalent of tense, or modal tense. This will give them a uniform way to respond to five different objections, one each by Skyrms, Quine, and Peacocke, and two by van Inwagen, and suggest a non-Lewisian path to modal realism. 0. Introduction The extensive parallel between temporal logic and modal logic has...

The modal nature of structures in ontic structural realism

Ontic structural realism is the view that structures are what is real in the first place in the domain of fundamental physics. The structures are usually conceived as including a primitive modality. However, it has not been spelled out as yet what exactly that modality amounts to. This paper proposes to fill this lacuna by arguing that the fundamental physical structures possess a causal essenc...