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The debate between scientific realism and anti-realism remains at a stalemate, making reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet, important work remains: exploring a common ground, even if only to uncover deeper points of disagreement and, ideally,…
We define realism using a slightly modified version of the EPR criterion of reality. This version is strong enough to show that relativity is incomplete. We show that this definition of realism is nonetheless compatible with the general…
Much has been discussed in the philosophy of science about how we should understand the scientific enterprise. On the one hand, scientific realists believe that empirically adequate theories can be supplemented by interpretations that can…
It is proposed here that all successful and complete theories always proceed through an intermediate stage of instrumentalism to the final stage of realism. Examples from history of science (both classical and modern) in support of this…
Scientific realism is, currently, one of the most well-entrenched background assumptions of some relevant versions of anti-exceptionalism about logic. We argue that this is a sort of sociological contingency rather than a metaphilosophical…
Counterfactual definiteness is supposed to underlie the Bell theorem. An old controversy exists among those who reject the theorem implications by rejecting counterfactual definiteness and those who claim that, since it is a direct…
We formally prove the existence of an enduring incongruence pervading a widespread interpretation of the Bell inequality and explain how to rationally avoid it with a natural assumption justified by explicit reference to a mathematical…
A new definition of "Realism" is proposed: it is that a gedanken "spectrograph" of hidden variables behaves as an actual (say, wavelength) spectrograph. The question is: does this definition allow, by itself, the derivation of Bell's…
Motivated by a generalization of Hempel's dilemma, I introduce a novel notion of empirical structure, as well as theory supervenience as a new reductive relationship between theories. One theory supervenes on another theory if the empirical…
This paper explores the options available to the anti-realist to defend a Quinean empirical under-determination thesis using examples of dualities. I first explicate a version of the empirical under-determination thesis that can be brought…
We provide new sufficient conditions under which Ryser's conjecture holds.
The Bell's inequalities are derived from the hypotheses of Locality, Realism and (what is lesser known) the equality between the factual and the counterfactual time averages of the expectation values of observables. The necessity of a…
There has been a recent spate of essays defending presentism, the view in the metaphysics of time according to which all and only present events or entities exist. What is particularly striking about this resurgence is that it takes place…
We defend a new theory of statistical evidence, which we call Robust Bayesianism (RB). We prove that, under widely accepted assumptions, RB entails the law of likelihood [Royall, 1997], the likelihood principle [Berger and Wolpert, 1988],…
It is argued that the traditional "realist" methodology of physics, according to which human concepts, laws and theories can grasp the essence of reality, is incompatible with the most fruitful interpretation of quantum formalism. The proof…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
We propose an interpretation of physics named potentiality realism. This view, which can be applied to classical as well as to quantum physics, regards potentialities (i.e. intrinsic, objective propensities for individual events to obtain)…
The papers mentioned in the bibliography lead to this new hypothesis which constitutes a wide panorama of the physical reality. Its coherence and its simplicity are virtues that make interesant to gaze upon it.
Our approach is basically a coherence approach, but we avoid the well-known pitfalls of coherence theories of truth. Consistency is replaced by reliability, which expresses support and attack, and, in principle, every theory (or agent,…
This paper engages the question "Does the consistency of a set of axioms entail the existence of a model in which they are satisfied?" within the frame of the Frege-Hilbert controversy. The question is related historically to the…