Speaking as someone who has personally felt the influence of the “Chomskian Turn”, I believe that one of Chomsky’s most significant contributions to Psychology, or as it is now called, Cognitive Science was to bring back scientific realism. This may strike you as a very odd claim, for one does not usually think of science as needing to be talked into scientific realism. Science is, after all, t...

Situated, embodied cognitive science is all the rage these days. Some (including the present author) have argued that situated, embodied cognitive science is incompatible with realism (metaphysical and scientific). In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: there is no reason one cannot be both a proponent of situated, embodied cognitive science and a realist. To show this, I point to flaws...

Earman (1993) distinguishes three notions of empirical indistinguishability and offers a rigorous framework to investigate how each of these notions relates to the problem of underdetermination of theory choice. He uses some of the results obtained in this framework to argue for a version of scientific anti-realism. In the present paper we first criticize Earman’s arguments for that position. S...

The naturalistic fallacy and Hume’s ‘law’ are frequently appealed to for the purpose of drawing limits around the scope of scientific inquiry into ethics and morality. These two objections are shown to be without force. Thus two highly influential obstacles are removed from naturalizing ethics. The relative merits of moral skepticism and moral realism are compared. Moral skepticism and some for...

son and world, scientist and fact, such that one assumes that fish exist a priori and independent of the scientist’s investigation. Organisms, however, shape their worlds as their worlds reciprocally shape them (Lewontin, 2000). Thus, the scientist who clears land on his or her property for a new tennis court will create the circumstances of a world lacking fish as facts for discovery. Cacioppo...

Kyle Stanford has recently claimed to offer a new challenge to scientific realism. Taking his inspiration from the familiar Pessimistic Induction (PI), Stanford proposes a New Induction (NI). Contra the suggestion that the NI is a “red herring”, I argue that it reveals something deep and important about science. The Problem of Unconceived Alternatives, which lies at the heart of the NI, yields ...

There has been an empiricist tradition in the core of Logical Positivism/ Empiricism, starting with Moritz Schlick and ending in Herbert Feigl (via Hans Reichenbach), according to which the world of empiricism need not be a barren place devoid of all the explanatory entities posited by scientific theories. The aim of this paper is to articulate this tradition and to explore ways in which its ke...

Does science successfully uncover the deep structure of the natural world? Or are the depths forever beyond our epistemic grasp? Since the decline of logical positivism and logical empiricism, scientific realism has become the consensus view: of course our scientific theories apprehend the deep structure of the world. What else could explain the remarkable success of science? This is the explan...

These three commentaries challenge me to confront some new issues as well as to clarify some main points. I want to thank James Ladyman, Peter Lipton, and Paul Teller especially for leavening their critique with so much constructive exploration of how one might go about meeting those challenges. Before replying directly I want to touch on something that has also come up elsewhere. Several revie...