Abstract
The dilemma between realism and anti-realism is focused on the character of reality: what is the real? Is it the singular or the universal, the individual or the species? Anti-realism claims that reality consists of individual, singular, actually existing things, while realism seeks the most essential element of reality in the universal. Thus, when the question arises as to the character of laws of nature, anti-realists can find no place for a real connection between separate cases. If there is nothing other than a long series of independent events, then law merely describes the similarity with which things happened in the past. Realists on the other hand claim that laws of nature express not only a uniformity of behaviour, but an inner string passing through particulars and linking them by a real necessity. It seems, therefore, that the issue, which occupies the minds of many present day philosophers, is still the question of the reality of that which traditionally has been called the fundamentum universalitatis. Its history can be traced back to the medieval debate between realism and nominalism and certainly further back to Plato and Aristotle.
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Sfendoni-Mentzou, D. (1996). The Reality of Thirdness — A Potential-Pragmatic Account of Laws of Nature. In: Cohen, R.S., Hilpinen, R., Renzong, Q. (eds) Realism and Anti-Realism in the Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 169. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8638-2_6
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