Scientific Realism: Between Platonism and Nominalism

Philosophy of Science 77 (5):947-958 (2010)
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Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the prospects of nominalistic scientific realism and show that it fails on many counts. In section 2, I discuss what is required for NSR to get off the ground. In section 3, I question the idea that theories have well-defined nominalistic content and the idea that causal activity is a necessary condition for commitment to the reality of an entity. In section 4, I challenge the notion of nominalistic adequacy of theories.

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Stathis Psillos
University of Athens

Citations of this work

General Theory of Topological Explanations and Explanatory Asymmetry.Daniel Kostic - 2020 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375 (1796):1-8.
(In)effective realism?Juha Saatsi - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (2):1-16.
Abstract versus Causal Explanations?Reutlinger Alexander & Andersen Holly - 2016 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (2):129-146.

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References found in this work

Science Without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism.Hartry H. Field - 1980 - Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
The scientific image.C. Van Fraassen Bas - 1980 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Indispensability of Mathematics.Mark Colyvan - 2001 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Frege.Michael Dummett - 1973 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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