Realism

Richard Lauer (St. Lawrence University)
Much discussion about social ontology is concerned with broadly intuitive a priori considerations, as well as technical tools drawn from analytic metaphysics. However, Kincaid (2015) argues for social realism by motivating a realistic interpretation of social scientific theories, in particular those theories concerned with the existence of ruling classes. This paper uses Kincaid's discussion to evaluate the prospects of a scientific social ontology. Because scientific ontology presupposes scientific realism, I will object to Kincaid's argument by denying realism about social scientific theories. I analyze and evaluate Kincaid's argument, expressing pessimism about the prospects of a scientific social ontology

Greg Frost-Arnold (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
The Pessimistic Induction over the history of science argues that because most past theories judged empirically successful in their time turn out to be not even approximately true, most present ones probably aren't approximately true either. But why did past scientists accept those incorrect theories? Kyle Stanford's 'Problem of Unconceived Alternatives' is one answer to that question: scientists are bad at exhausting the space of plausible hypotheses to explain the evidence available to them. Here, I offer a competing answer, which I call the 'Problem of Misleading Evidence.' I argue that this proposal is, in important respects, superior to Stanford's.

P. Kyle Stanford (University of California, Irvine)
Stanford suggests that the historical evidence used to challenge scientific realism should lead us to embrace Uniformitarianism, but many recently influential forms of scientific realism seem happy to share this commitment. I trace a number of further points of common ground that collectively constitute an appealing Middle Path between classical forms of realism and instrumentalism, and I suggest that many contemporary realists and instrumentalists have already become fellow travelers on this Middle Path without recognizing how far they have thereby diverged from those who share their labels and slogans. I conclude by describing their central remaining disagreement and the sorts of evidence needed to resolve it.

Elay Shech (Auburn University)
Historical inductions, viz., the pessimistic meta-induction and the problem of unconceived alternatives, are critically analyzed via John Norton's material theory of induction and subsequently rejected as non-cogent arguments. It is suggested that the material theory is amenable to a local version of the pessimistic meta-induction, e.g., in the context of some medical studies.