Abstract

When we think of scientific realism, there seem to be to ways to conceive of what it is about. The first is to see it as a view about scientific theories; the second is to see it as a view about the world. Some philosophers, most typically from Australia, think that the second way is the correct way. Scientific realism, they argue, is a metaphysical thesis: it asserts the reality of some types of entity, most typically, unobservable entities. I agree that scientific realism has a metaphysical dimension, but I have insisted that it has other dimensions too. In my (1999), I took scientific realism to consist of three theses (or stances).