When once-successful physical theories are abandoned, common wisdom has it that their characteristic theoretical entities are abandoned with them: examples include phlogiston, light rays, Newtonian forces, Euclidean space. But sometimes a theory sees ongoing use, despite being superseded. What should scientific realists say about the characteristic entities of the theories in such cases? The standard answer is that these ‘theoretical relicts’ are merely useful fictions. In this paper we offer a different answer. We start by distinguishing horizontal reduction (in which (...) a superseded theory approximates the successor theory) from vertical reduction (in which a higher-level theory abstracts away from the lower-level theory, but nonetheless can be constructed from it); these are usually regarded as having different ontological consequences. We describe a ‘verticalization’ procedure which transforms horizontal reductions into vertical reductions. The resulting verticalized theories are abstractions rather than approximations, with restricted domains. We identify a sense in which the higher-level theory describes distinct subject matters from the lower-level theory, enabling in certain cases the higher-level theory to retain distinctive explanatory power even in the presence of reduction. We suggest that theoretical entities from superseded theories should be retained in a scientific realist worldview just when, reinterpreted as higher-level abstractions, those theories and their characteristic entities continue to perform distinctive explanatory work in providing the best explanation for less-fundamental phenomena of interest. In slogan form: a good relict is an emergent relict. (shrink)

We examine arguments for distinguishing between ontological and epistemological concepts of fundamentality, focusing in particular on the role that scale plays in these concepts. Using the fractional quantum Hall effect as a case study, we show that we can draw a distinction between ontologically fundamental and non-fundamental theories without insisting that it is only the fundamental theories that get the ontology right: there are cases where non-fundamental theories involve distinct ontologies that better characterize real systems than fundamental ones do. In (...) order to reconcile these distinct ontologies between fundamental and non-fundamental theories, we suggest that ontology must be understood as scale-dependent. (shrink)

In the recent years, attempts to relate metaphysics and sciences have taken various alternative forms such as metaphysics applied to science, metaphysics of science, and scientific metaphysics. In this article, I focus on scientific metaphysics and specifically explore the challenges with developing ontologies through four arguments. The Argument from Representational Indeterminacy highlights that global ontologies fail to clearly identify their target phenomenon. The Argument from Independent Inaccessibility explores the methodological difficulty of accessing a world that is independent of specific sets (...) of phenomena. The Argument from Conceptual Mismatch focuses on the tendency of local ontologies to pick out arbitrary scientific concepts, adapting them to study phenomena where they might not fit well. Finally, the Argument from Eliminative Prophecy details the possibility that local ontologies could eventually be rendered redundant by mature versions of scientific theories. In the end, given these challenges, I recommend an eliminativist stance toward ontology development. (shrink)

Key arguments and claims in Steven French's The Structure of the World are articulated and assessed. Differences between different forms of ontic structural realism are articulated, and some problems raised for some aspects of French's version.

Organizational research constitutes a differentiated, complex and fragmented field with multiple contradicting and incommensurable theories that make fundamentally different claims about the social and organizational reality. In contrast to natural sciences, the progress in this field can’t be attributed to the principle of truthlikeness where theories compete against each other and only best theories survive and prove they are closer to the truth and thus demonstrate scientific knowledge accumulation. We defend the structural realist view on the nature of organizational theories (...) in order to demonstrate that despite the multiplicity of isolated and competing explanations of organization-environment relations these theories are still logically compatible and mutually consistent which, in turn, assures theoretical progress in the field. Although postulating different and incompatible ontologies, three most successful organization-environments theories, namely, contingency theory, new institutionalism and population ecology share the same explanations of the relations between organizations and environments at the structural level. Without this principle one would say that what occurs in the field of organization theory is a change rather than a progress. (shrink)