Descriptions and non-linguistic representations

The primary goal of this work has been to propose a metaphysics for scientific realism, and with much of this project now in hand we are well placed to confront one last constellation of issues. Part I focused on the question of what realism is and what it has become, tracing the evolution of the position over recent history and in response to specific forms of antirealist scepticism. In the course of that discussion I fused what I think are the most promising features of these developments and called the resulting package ‘semirealism’, reflecting the graded commitment and epistemically selective attitude characteristic of sophisticated versions of realism today. In Part II, I developed a proposal for the key foundational concepts of semirealism, plausible accounts of which are important to the internal coherence of a realist approach to scientific knowledge. There I considered the nature of causal processes and causal properties, dispositions and necessity, laws of nature, and the place of natural kinds within scientific taxonomy. Equipped with this framework, I believe I am now in a position to begin the process of connecting, more explicitly, the metaphysics of semirealism with certain aspects of its epistemology.

In many philosophical contexts it is difficult to separate epistemic considerations from metaphysical ones, and this is very much the case in the broader context of scientific realism. It is, after all, a thesis or a stance concerning the interpretation of scientific knowledge.