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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Laudan's pessimistic induction targets entity-level ontology, which structural realists explicitly do not commit to as the locus of scientific success.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Structures cannot be instantiated or causally efficacious without some concrete relata; claiming success depends only on structure still presupposes some ontology.
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    • 2.Laudan's argument applies equally to structural properties: if electron spin structure was wrong before, why trust current structural attributions more than entity claims?
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    • 3.The distinction between entity and structure is unclear; 'structure' in physics often refers to causal-relational properties of entities, not ontologically independent objects.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Laudan's induction assumes entities like phlogiston and caloric are the grounds of theory success, but structural realism relocates success to relational patterns.
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    • 2.If structural invariants persist across theory change while posited entities do not, then entities cannot explain why successful theories remain approximately true.
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    • 3.Structural realism immunizes itself from Laudan's argument by design, since it never claimed unobservable entities were necessary for predictive achievement.
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