Abstract
A realist, in one philosophical sense of this term, is someone who holds that the entities posed by a well-established theory exist (and may be contrasted with an anti-realist who regards such terms merely as convenient fictions). The corresponding notion of realism thus characterizes a descriptive concept (a theory), the referents of which can be conceived as elements of reality. Every scientist is a realist in a minimal sense insofar as the standard methodology of science requires that models and theories are empirically checked by such elements of reality. This check can confirm or disprove a given hypothesis. It always rests on empirical tools, e.g., measuring instruments, which are presupposed in an unsophisticated, common sense manner. For this reason and in this sense, the concepts of realism and reality are to be understood as relative to such tools. In spite of the option to use empirical facts and data for checking models and theories, it is, however, everything else than clear how these two domains are related to each other. There are levels of discussion at which it seems unnecessary to consider any such relationship at all, and there are other levels of discussion which require such a relationship to be explicitly taken into account.
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Atmanspacher, H., Kronz, F. (1999). Relative Onticity. In: Atmanspacher, H., Amann, A., Müller-Herold, U. (eds) On Quanta, Mind and Matter. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 102. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4581-7_14
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