Synopsis
(1) Only ideal or perfected science accurately and reliably depicts reality, and not science as we do or shall actually have it. (2) In matters of inductive theorizing, “the actual truth” is attained only in the ideal limit. (3) In the course of actual practice, scientific inquiry provides no more than our best available estimate of the truth. The only unproblematically viable sort of scientific realism is accordingly one that is geared to the ideal state.
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Notes to Chapter Three
C. S. Peirce through K. R. Popper’s Logik der Forschung, Vienna, 1935
Nancy Cartwright’s How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford, 1984.
Larry Laudan, ‘The Philosophy of Progress’, mimeographed preprint, Pittsburgh, 1979, p. 4.
Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, London, 1968
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Rescher, N. (1987). Ideal-Science Realism. In: Scientific Realism. Scientific Realism, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3905-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3905-9_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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