The issue of scientific realism
pp. 45-64
in: Mario Alai, Marco Buzzoni, Gino Tarozzi (eds), Science between truth and ethical responsibility, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
Agazzi stages a complete, very detailed and overall convincing defence of scientific realism, its presuppositions and corollaries (mind-independence of reality, referentiality of theories, truth as correspondence, knowledge as the goal of science, justifiability of beliefs in unobservables through abductive arguments). But his claims that truth is relative to a circumscribed domain, not "pictorial" and not pertaining to theories, and that scientific objects certainly exist because they are nothing but abstract bundles of properties, are potentially ambiguous. Moreover, to the antirealist objections based on radical theory-change he replies that pre- and post-revolutionary theories do not contradict each other and are equally true, because each one deals with a different domain of objects of its own making: but this reply (apparently a legacy of neopositivistic operationalism) risks to make theories analytic, so slipping into conventionalism, or to reduce their content to observable phenomena, thus giving into antirealism.