Structural realism: Continuity and its limits

In Alisa Bokulich & Peter Bokulich, Scientific Structuralism. Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 105--117 (2011)
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Abstract

Structural realists of nearly all stripes endorse the structural continuity claim. Roughly speaking, this is the claim that the structure of successful scientific theories survives theory change because it has latched on to the structure of the world. In this paper I elaborate, elucidate and modify the structural continuity claim and its associated argument. I do so without presupposing a particular conception of structure that favours this or that kind of structural realism. Instead I focus on how structural realists can best account for the neutrally formulated historical facts. The result, I hope, crystallises some of the shared commitments, desiderata and limits of structural realists

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original Votsis, Ioannis (manuscript) "Structural realism: Invariance through theory change".

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Ioannis Votsis
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Citations of this work

Structural Realism.James Ladyman - 2012 - In Ed Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Structural realism and the nature of structure.Jonas R. Becker Arenhart & Otávio Bueno - 2015 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 5 (1):111-139.
Disarming the Ultimate Historical Challenge to Scientific Realism.Peter Vickers - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (3):987-1012.

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References found in this work

Laws and symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Reason, Truth and History.Hilary Putnam - 1981 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The metaphysics within physics.Tim Maudlin - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Science Without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism.Hartry H. Field - 1980 - Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.

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