On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 12:52 AM John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have no idea what the difference is between "text-book" realism and > "Eisteinian realism" is and I don't think you do either, in physics there > is just realism and nonrealism. And you don't give any definition of > "Realism" at all, you just say I'm wrong; but Wikipedia agrees with my > definition of the word, it says: > > "*R**ealism is "counterfactual definiteness", the idea that it is > possible to meaningfully describe as definite the result of a measurement > which, in fact, has not been performed (i.e. the ability to assume the > existence of objects, and assign values to their properties, even when they > have not been measured)*. > Gosh, you must have had to troll through an awful lot of stuff on Wikipedia to find that particular definition of realism. I suggest you look for "scientific realism" instead of that self-serving nonsense. Scientific realism involves the two basic positions. First, it is a set of claims about the features of an ideal scientific theory; an ideal theory is the sort of theory science aims to produce. Second, it is the commitment that science will eventually produce theories very much like an ideal theory and that science has done pretty well thus far in some domains. It is important to note that one might be a scientific realist regarding some sciences while not being a realist regarding others. According to scientific realism, an ideal scientific theory has the following features: - The claims the theory makes are either true or false, depending on whether the entities talked about by the theory exist and are correctly described by the theory. This is the semantic <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic> commitment of scientific realism. - The entities described by the scientific theory exist objectively and mind-independently. This is the metaphysical <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics> commitment of scientific realism. - There are reasons to believe some significant portion of what the theory says. This is the epistemological <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology> commitment. Combining the first and the second claim entails <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_consequence> that an ideal scientific theory says definite things about genuinely existing entities. The third claim says that we have reasons to believe that many scientific claims about these entities are true, but not all. Bruce PS. Insults are often the only possible response to trolling behaviour. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLSGGLeJt3pC2zfSpNqhLXza_3VixfYKwMz%2BQZONW_j3jA%40mail.gmail.com.
