Abstract
We will start by sketching in a systematic order the most important epistemological positions in the instrumentalism-realism debate, viz., instrumentalism, constructive empiricism, referential realism and theory realism. They will be ordered according to their answers to a number of leading questions, where every next question presupposes an affirmative answer to the foregoing one. The survey is restricted to the investigation of the natural world and hence to the natural sciences. It should be stressed that several complications arise if one wants to take the social and cultural world into account. However, the present survey may well function as a point of departure for discussing epistemological positions in the social sciences and the humanities.
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Notes
Of course, placing an author in some place does not mean that he does not pay attention to another perspective. E.g., putting Niiniluoto on the actualist side of the truth approximation perspective only means that his main emphasis lies there. However, he also pays attention to the modal perspective and to the truth-value perspective. Similarly, although Popper and Giere seem to have primarily the nomic version in mind, they do not exclude the actual version.
This term is used by Radder (1988), however, in a much stronger sense, viz., a strong version of constructive realism (see below).
See (Niiniluoto 1984) for a lucid account of the relation between Popper, Peirce, and Whewell.
The phrase ‘nominalistic realism’ would also be adequate if that were not generally conceived as a contradictio in terminis.
See (Kuipers and Mackor 1995) and (Kuipers SiS) for more examples of cognitive structures and their use-value.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kuipers, T.A.F. (2000). General Introduction: Epistemological Positions. In: From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism. Synthese Library, vol 287. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1618-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1618-5_1
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