Professor Peter Vickers peter.vickers@durham.ac.uk
Head of Department
A success-to-truth inference has always been at the heart of scientific realist positions. But all attempts to articulate the inference have met with very significant challenges. This paper reconstructs the evolution of this inference, and brings together a number of qualifications in an attempt to articulate a contemporary (‘local’) success-to-truth inference which is realistic. I argue that this contemporary version of the inference has a chance, at least, of overcoming the historical challenges which have been proffered to date (and without moving all the way to structural realism). However, there is a price to pay: the developments which help the realist answer the historical challenges also serve to increase the number of non-historical challenges.
Vickers, P. (2019). Towards a realistic success-to-truth inference for scientific realism. Synthese, 196(2), 571-585. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1150-9
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jun 25, 2016 |
Online Publication Date | Jul 8, 2016 |
Publication Date | Feb 28, 2019 |
Deposit Date | Aug 12, 2016 |
Publicly Available Date | Aug 12, 2016 |
Journal | Synthese |
Print ISSN | 0039-7857 |
Electronic ISSN | 1573-0964 |
Publisher | Springer |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 196 |
Issue | 2 |
Pages | 571-585 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1150-9 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1406535 |
Published Journal Article
(421 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Published Journal Article (Advance online version)
(320 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
Advance online version © The Author(s) 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life
(2025)
Journal Article
The Call for a New Definition of Biosignature.
(2023)
Journal Article
Don’t we all believe in scientific facts? Replies to my critics
(2023)
Journal Article
Breakthrough results in astrobiology: is ‘high risk’ research needed?
(2023)
Journal Article
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search