Scientific Realism , the Galilean Strategy and Representation 1

This paper critically reviews Philip Kitcher’s most recent epistemology of science, real realism. I argue that this view is unstable under different understandings of the term “representation”, and that the arguments offered for the position are either unsound or invalid depending on the understanding employed. Suitably modified those arguments are however convincing in favor of a deflationary version of real realism, which I refer to as the bare view. The bare view accepts Kitcher’s Galilean strategy, and the ensuing commitment to the existence of unobservables; but it does not trade on a correspondence or copy theory of representation. So the bare view, unlike real realism, does not entail that our representations match reality even approximately. 1. Models and Realism “Scientific models” is an old topic in the philosophy of science. Duhem and Poincaré both discussed models extensively and acknowledged, with some degree of disaffection, their prominent role in science (Duhem, 1914/54; Poincaré, 1908, esp. Book I; Poincaré, 1935). Although the logical positivists were on the whole critical of the use of models (e.g. Carnap, 1966, esp. Part V) – the topic resurfaced in the contemporaneous wellknown work of Norman Campbell (Campbell, 1920, part I). It achieved its heyday probably in the late 1960’s, in the wake of Mary Hesse’s consummate and masterly work on analogy (Hesse, 1966). Later, in the writings of the proponents of the semantic conception, it became assimilated to the different topic of understanding the structure of theoretical knowledge, and consequently the 1970’s and 1980’s saw the focus of 1 Forthcoming in W. González (Ed.), Scientific Realism and Democratic Society: The Philosophy of Philip Kitcher, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2 The first version was delivered at the Ferrol conference in honor of Philip Kitcher in February 2006. The final version was submitted during my stay as visiting scholar at Harvard University, in September 2009, and I want to thank the Philosophy Department, in particular Hilary Putnam, for sponsorship. Financial help is acknowledged from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (research projects HUM200501787-C03-01, FFI2008-06418-C03-01 and PR2008-0079).