Causal connections and de re necessity

I began with a rough, first approximation view of scientific realism: scientific theories correctly describe the nature of a mind-independent world. But this turned out to be rather too rough and too approximate, and as a consequence realists have proceeded to characterize their understandings of scientific knowledge in more plausible ways. They add caveats to the effect that realism should embrace only theories that are non-ad hoc and sufficiently mature, or that occur in sufficiently mature domains of theorizing which tend to be non-ad hoc, and that theories are often only approximately true but on the right track, and increasingly so over time. Even these refinements, however, are insufficient in light of the pessimistic induction (PI), and among the various attempts to cope with this challenge, the most promising forms of realism exemplify the strategy of selective scepticism – believing in some but not all aspects of theories, in accordance with some epistemic principle of demarcation. Entity realism (ER) and both the epistemic and ontic forms of structural realism (SR) are helpful but problematic stages on the road to what I described as a further evolution of realism.