Abstract
In this final chapter of the book we want to draw the main lines of the picture that has arisen in the previous chapters about the nature of scientific knowledge and its development, which was denoted as constructive realism. We start with a survey of the main conclusions thus far. In the remaining sections we will further articulate this particular epistemological position. Although this is the proper place for this articulation, detailed acquaintance with the foregoing Part IV is not strictly necessary. In this respect, Chapter 2 of Part I, Part II and Chapter 7 and 9 of Part III, and hence their main conclusions indicated below, are the most important ones.
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Notes
Recall that we have explicated, in CHAPTER 7 and 9, `inference to the best explanation’ as `inference to the best theory as the closest to the (observational or theoretical) truth’.
The term `abduction’ could also have been used for theoretical induction. However, we do not want to suggest that the generation of theoretical hypotheses is part of what we want to express. On the other hand, it is important to undo the term induction’ in the combination with theoretical (and referential) induction with the connotation of (mere) extrapolation.
Of course, there may also be indirect test-methods, see below, but they should be replaceable by direct ones.
In PART III and IV the disentanglement of the domain vocabulary Vd ,the domain D and THE REAL WORLD could have been included in the presentation, starting from CHAPTER 7, but this would have complicated the presentation very much. See (Zwart 1998) for some further aspects of such a disentanglement, in particular, regarding the two different meanings of the idea of strengthening a theory X:a transition from X to a subset X’(the meaning used in this book), or a transition from domain D of X to a superset D’.
Recall from the end of Section 13.2. that theoretical induction may imply some kinds of referential induction, but not all.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kuipers, T.A.F. (2000). Conclusion: Constructive Realism. In: From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism. Synthese Library, vol 287. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1618-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1618-5_13
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