Is Science Real?
Are you ever ___ 31 ___ to ask whether entities such as electrons, black holes and the Higgs particle really exist? As a chemist I worry about what is real and dependable in my field. I also care because all of this goes to the heart of an old, important – and unresolved – debate about how to regard scientific discoveries.
There are two main camps in this debate: scientific realism and antirealism. Scientific realism holds that if science has made great progress by invoking entities such as electrons, then we should take the next step of accepting that they really do exist, that the world described by science is the “real” world. Our present theories are too ___ 32 ___ to have happened by chance: somehow we have latched onto the blueprint of the universe.
This is not to everybody’s taste. Anti-realists accept the progress made by science but stop short of making the additional leap of ___ 33 ___ of believing in the materiality of things they cannot actually see. The anti-realist typically presents a counter-argument along these lines: so many past theories have come and gone, why should we ever regard any of them as real?
Anti-realists also argue that their approach places them in a better position to ___ 34 ___ change when an established entity or theory becomes redundant. Not investing belief in a particular theory, they claim, allows them to move on to alternatives more easily.
Realists retort such an approach is cavalier, or even dangerous. Science progresses by creeping up on the truth about the world: ___ 35 ___ successive theories were merely to replace one another, that progress would be truly miraculous.
Eric Scerri, New Scientist