Scientific realism in contemporary philosophy

Scientific realism is a philosophical approach that claims the literal truth of scientific theories. This approach would not be philosophically interesting if there were not ample philosophical, historical and sociological arguments that would argue against it. In this thesis we evaluate the arguments of Paul Feyerabend, Arthur Fine, Thomas S. Kuhn, Larry Laudan and Bas van Fraassen as well as the challenge of social constructivists. All the counterarguments are weighed against the most up-to-date arguments for scientific realism – notably, Philip Kitcher, Jarrett Leplin, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Stathis Psillos and others. We claim that scientific realism is a consistent and soundly substantiated account of scientific theories which best explains the empirical success of scientific theories and which, therefore, is justly believed to be a truthful theoretical attitude. Scientific realism is a consistent theoretical attitude because it starts from the two premises that there is a mind independent world of a particular structure (an ontological premise) and that science is able to know this world (an epistemic premise) and concludes with a semantic thesis that scientific theories represent what the world is like. Scientific realism is a sound and well substantiated theoretical attitude because the arguments against it do not succeed to refute it. It grounds its epistemic optimism in the denial to draw a rigid line between the observable and unobservable aspects of the world and in the use of abductive inference that is also known as an inference to the best explanation. The use of a two-dimensional causal-descriptive theory of reference allows scientific realism to respond to the claim that scientific theories are incommensurable. One can discriminate theoretical mechanisms and entities in contemporary scientific theories that were retained from the theories formerly successful, but now known to be false. This enables scientific realism to retort to the argument that the existence of successful but false theories confutes scientific realism. Moreover, scientific realism provides a more rationally compelling explanation of scientific theories than social constructivism, a distinct kind of critique against scientific realism, does. Finally, scientific realism is indeed the best explanation of the empirical success of science. No other available explanation of the success of science explains the success of a particular scientific theory. Moreover, these alternative explanations of the success of science usually entail the scientific realist explanation and thus are not genuine