1 Confirming Idealized Theories and Scientific Realism

In the traditional debate between realism and antirealism, or more broadly speaking, in any traditional systematic account of aspects of science, such as scientific explanation and confirmation, scientific theories or their constituent statements are assumed to be either true or false. The notion of idealization or approximation was rarely invoked. More recent participants of this debate seem to have noticed this neglect, and phrases such as ‘approximately true ’ appeared more frequently in the literature; but the change is merely cosmetic: the phrases are added merely to extend the applicability of claims obtained by arguments that take no notice of approximation or idealization. What I can gather in reading philosophers such as Richard Boyd, who uses ‘true or approximately true ’ rather than simply ‘true ’ consistently in his writings is that a theory or a law statement in question is either not yet true but very close to being true or not yet true but well on the way to being true. Similarly, philosophers who acknowledge the fact that most, if not all, scientific theories or statements of law are idealized usually take such theories or law statements to differ from the true ones in only negligible degrees. Similar situations occur in approaches of confirmation (or theory testing): while