"What relevance does the term scientific realism have for those of us who
are not professional philosophers of science? Check for yourself what sort of
perspective you have on scientific assertions, regardless of your philosophy.
As you look at this page, you see a sheet of white paper with black markings on
it. Touch the page with a finger and feel its smooth texture and its relative
coolness or warmth. Now sit back and ask yourself: do I think of the
whiteness, texture, and coolness of the paper as qualities of this material
existing in it independent of my senses? Do those qualities exist "out there,"
in or on the paper, unrelated to my awareness of them?
"They certainly seem to be attributes inherent to the paper, and if we
believe that they exist in that way, then we are adherents of everyday realism.
There are problems, however, in this viewpoint. If we assert that such
qualities exist out there as they appear to, we are implicitly assuming that
our visual and tactile sense faculties play an utterly passive role in the
perception of them. That is, these faculties would act simply as clear windows
through which color, texture, and coolness flow from the object to the
perceiving subject. Much research has gone into studying the functioning of
our sense faculties, but none of it has led to the assertion that they function
passively as simple receptors of objective color, texture, sound, and so on.
Moreover, if we reflect on the wide range of visual faculties of fish, insects,
birds, and mammals, for instance, it seems exceedingly hard to believe that
they all se the world in the same way. What they see is created in p
art by the specific types of visual organs that they have.
"Now a new question is raised: if the above sensory impressions exist only
in relation to the subjective senses, what is really out there that causes our
senses to be stimulated so that we perceive colors and so forth? In other
words, what is the nature of the real world as it exists independent of human
perceptions? What is truly out there? This question has been asked by
thinkers of Greek antiquity, and since then a myriad of theories have been
devised to describe and explain the nature of such reality. These range from
thoroughgoing idealism to materialism, and insofar as we adopt any such theory,
we become adherents of _transcendental realism_: we believe in a theory about
the real, intrinsic nature of the world as it exists behind the veil of the
senses. It is a metaphysical perspective that purportedly transcends sensory
appearances and reaches the inherent nature of reality that lies beyond.
"Do we believe that the real, objective nature of color pertains to a
certain range of frequencies of electromagnetic waves? Objectively speaking,
is sound another form of wave pattern that moves through various media such as
the atmosphere and water? Are warmth and coolness really a matter of kinetic
energy of random movements of molecules that make up the physical world? It
transcends the misleading, subjective impressions of the senses and penetrates
to the objective reality that exists independent of perception.
"While scientific realism as defined above is no longer considered tenable
by most philosophers of science, it is still the metaphysical view that
saturates most instruction in science today. Yet this metaphysical stance is
rarely mentioned in classrooms or the popular media when discussing scientific
theories. It is simply taken for granted: a metaphysical viewpoint that is
regarded by philosophers as highly problematic is absorbed unconsciously and
uncritically. It nevertheless exerts a powerful influence on the thoughts and
attitudes of those that hold them."
(Wallace, B. Alan, 'Choosing Reality, : A Buddhist View of Physics
and the Mind', 2003, pp.46-48)
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