Contemporary Scientific Realism The Challenge from the History of Science

Timothy D. Lyons is Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He has numerous publications on the scientific realism debate in, for instance: The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. He is the author of Scientific Realism, Elements in Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Peter Vickers is Associate Professor and Reader in the Department of Philosophy at University of Durham in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Understanding Inconsistent Science (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the Associate Editor of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. He has several publications on the scientific realism debate in, for instance: The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and The European Journal for Philosophy of Science.

Chapter 1. Introduction, Timothy D. Lyons and Peter Vickers

Part I: Historical Cases for the Debate
Chapter 2. Continuity, Truth, and Pessimism: Revisiting the Miasma Theory, Dana Tulodziecki
Chapter 3. What Can the Discovery of Boron Tell Us About the Scientific Realism Debate?, Jonathon Hricko
Chapter 4. No Miracle After All: The Thomson Brothers' Novel Prediction that Pressure Lowers the Freezing Point of Water, Keith Hutchison
Chapter 5. From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence: Descartes, Newton, and Beyond, Stathis Psillos
Chapter 6. How Was Nicholson's Proto-Element Theory Able to Yield Explanatory as well as Predictive Success?, Eric Scerri
Chapter 7. Selective Scientific Realism and Truth-Transfer in Theories of Molecular Structure, Amanda Nichols and Myron Penner
Chapter 8. Realism, Physical Meaningfulness, and Molecular Spectroscopy, Teru Miyake and George E. Smith

Part II: Contemporary Scientific Realism
Chapter 9. The Historical Challenge to Realism and Essential Deployment, Mario Alai
Chapter 10. Realism, Instrumentalism, Particularism: A Middle Path Forward in the Scientific Realism Debate, Kyle Stanford
Chapter 11. Structure not Selection, James Ladyman
Chapter 12. The Case of the Consumption Function: Structural Realism in Macroeconomics, Jennifer Jhun
Chapter 13. We Think, They Thought: A Critique of the Pessimistic Meta-Meta Induction, Ludwig Fahrbach
Chapter 14. The Paradox of Infinite Limits: A Realist Response, Patricia Palacios and Giovanni Valente
Chapter 15. Realist Representations of Particles: The Standard Model, Top Down and Bottom Up, Anjan Chakravartty

Index