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Is Structure Not Enough?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ioannis Votsis
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Abstract

This paper counters an objection raised against one of Bertrand Russell's lesser-known epistemological views, viz. “structural realism” (SR). In short, SR holds that at most we have knowledge of the structure of the external (i.e., physical) world. M. H. A. Newman's allegedly fatal objection is that SR is either trivial or false. I argue that the accusation of triviality is itself empty since it fails to establish that SR knowledge claims are uninformative. Moreover, appealing to Quine's notion of ontological relativity, I suggest that far from being false, SR knowledge claims seem to be the most that we can hope for.

Type
Realism
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 70 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2003 , pp. 879 - 890
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Many thanks to John Worrall, Jeff Ketland, Michael Redhead, Christoph Schmidt-Petri, and Peter Dietsch for valuable comments on the material in this paper. I gratefully acknowledge financial support for attending the PSA meeting from a National Science Foundation travel grant as well as from the Department of Philosophy at LSE.

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