 I hate it when philosophers make up beliefs that nobody actually has to prove a point, like last Thursday-ism. Like, come on, at least use some sort of realism. Scientific realism is the position that the subjects of scientific inquiry actually exist, that there is an objective reality outside ourselves that we can know about through the practice of science. In a room full of philosophers, you might get more than a few raised eyebrows or amused chuckles at such an assertion, because it's chock-full of devastating philosophical landmines. Knowledge. Objective reality, you say. And how precisely are you defining science, my friend? We're fighting quite a few bullets at the same time here, and we're going to run afoul of a vicious skeptical gauntlet about all sorts of things. There's an additional complication of trying to keep a healthy distance from scientism, a sort of fanboy attitude that cheers on science as the singular answer to all problems, moral, practical, social, epistemic, even in domains where empirical information can be demonstrated to be wholly irrelevant. A person who advocates scientism will say, well, have you tried doing more science to it? We're going to try to thread the needle here between that sort of uncritical scientism and a hypercritical philosophical skepticism, to simply say that scientific theories tell us true things about the universe, full stop. That doesn't imply that they can tell us everything we can possibly know, or how to solve non-empirical questions, just facts about things that exist. The realist position is sort of the default one. It wouldn't occur to the average person that belief in atoms and magnetism needs some sort of rigorous justification. In a sense, anti-realist positions are a reaction to philosophical questioning that uncovers weaknesses in the default position. Because they arise in response to these weaknesses, they might be imagined to be engineered with the sort of probing in mind, to have ready and convincing answers to these sorts of questions. Postmodernism is very good at responding to the typical critiques of modernism. Anti-realist positions are very good at responding to the issues with scientific realism. But even if they can be philosophically attractive, I think there's something important missing in these accounts, a compelling and unambiguous basis for epistemic normativity. Anti-realist approaches may offer some justifications for preferring a reasonable scientific theory to a crackpot one. Or sometimes they don't. But either way, the normative standards offered by pragmatism, postmodernism, instrumentalism, and so on feel weak compared to the simple and straightforward appeal to the reality of scientific subjects to explain why something is a good or bad idea. It's one thing to say that you think that the Chinese government's widespread treatment of COVID-19 with traditional Chinese herbal remedies designed to balance their yin and yang is unlikely to succeed based on past experience, or conflicts with a more widespread narrative about reality. It's another thing to say that viruses exist, that traditional Chinese medicine does not affect them, so those treatments are going to fail. I'm always happy to experiment with interesting systems of thought in how they work, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the pushback against scientism. But in a world where appeals to reality construction or narrative can leave room for an idea to weasel its way out of a clear and unambiguous scientific death blow, I think it may be worth risking a little credulity if the case for scientific realism is convincing enough to warrant it. I'll leave that up to you. We're going to take a quick tour of the various objections mounted against scientific realism to see why there's so much hand-wreeling over the default view that science really is telling us true things about the universe. I'm not going to take the substantial amount of time necessary to properly diffuse these arguments, if indeed they can be diffused, but I want to plow right into the positive account of why scientific realism is probably right. If it is right, those critiques must be wrong or confused in some way, and if you agree, you can share the struggle to figure out exactly where they go awry with a number of other philosophers. Our first and chief complaint has to do with how human perception works, questioning our variability to acquire objective facts at all. It's commonly thought that our senses are reporting raw information about the world, but that's not really how all this works. What we pay attention to and the concepts that we use to parse what we're seeing and hearing and so on are demonstrably shaped by our culture, our history and our genetics, and have tremendous influence over what we end up thinking our senses are telling us. Different people with different backgrounds will literally observe different things from the same stimuli. In order to be a realist about anything, even non-scientific things, it seems that we have to give some account of how we can come to know objective facts at all, with all this subjective crap setting between our perception and the world as it is. It's only the biggest problem in epistemology, NBD. While we're at it, we can roll in other large-scale skeptical objections like the problem of induction, which undermines our supposed knowledge of causation through inference, and the demarcation problem, knowing which things are actually science and which things are just pretending to be science for credibility. I've covered these arguments in previous videos that you can also watch and fret over. Knowledge is hard, guys. The other philosophical complaints are specific to scientific realism, including the problem of underdetermination. For any given set of experimental results, there may be multiple scientific theories that offer functional explanations for those results, possibly making use of different theoretical entities, and the scientific realist position doesn't really give us any clues about which of these theories is supposed to be the truth of the matter. For example, there are multiple conflicting interpretations of quantum mechanics, which is really real, the Copenhagen or the Many Worlds theory. We've exhausted this criterion of science tells us true things, and we're still left with two things that can't both be true. It's underdetermined. There are games that we can play with these theories sharing the same empirically relevant observations of those entities, but it's still a headscratcher. Our third objection should be familiar to anyone who's a fan of science. The missteps in the development of our current scientific theories have been pretty egregious in some cases. Chloric theory, recapitulation theory, study-state theory, the list of entities formally theorized to exist and now resigned to the scrap heap of history is substantial. This doesn't even cover the numerous instances where pseudoscientific results have clearly been driven by cultural agendas, which is a whole other can of worms. It's mitigated somewhat by an acknowledgement that scientific theories are only approximating truth in some fashion, that they are approaching unity with the actual state of affairs of the universe, and we can judge how close they are to that truth by how robust and accurate their predictions are. But it still seems like a bit of an issue. That's a formidable mountain of skepticism that we're trying to clamor over here. But really, what did you expect? Philosophers have found concerning gaps in our naive accounts of much more fundamental stuff. Time, identity, knowledge of the world, in general, even basic stuff like chairs and rocks. When you add further claims about a particular subset of our experience called science, there are going to be some analytical holes that need plugging. But let's take a look at some positive arguments that make a case for scientific realism, that hopefully should provide us with some grit to engage with those problems instead of abandoning ship in favor of an anti-realist theory built to skirt around them. The first such argument is from independent corroboration. Often, when a branch of science finds some entity useful in explaining a phenomenon, the same entity is useful for explanation in a totally different experimental context or field, in a way that would be very surprising if it were just a useful fiction. We look under a microscope and we see tiny critters replicating and we say, those are bacteria. We observe someone infected with pneumonia and we say, that's bacteria. We swab them, grow a culture in a petri dish and say, that's bacteria. We find medication that kills the stuff in the petri dish, give it to the patient and they get better. We say, those antibiotics killed the bacteria. Four very different phenomena with significantly different causal mechanisms, microscopy, medical diagnosis, cultures, meditative efficacy, all explained by the same scientific theory about the same sort of thing. It would be a hell of a coincidence if it turned out that that thing didn't actually exist. Speaking of coincidence, the No Miracles argument is without a doubt the biggest feather in the cap of a scientific realist. Turning on one critical point that bears emphasis, science works. It wins. It keeps winning over and over. In the few hundred years since the widespread acceptance of the scientific method, it's resulted in radio, atomic power, antibiotics, computers, space travel, genetic engineering. Scientific methods just keep racking up incredibly accurate in useful predictions and explanations, in ways that other predictive and explanatory approaches don't. This is probably a familiar refrain, but consider the implications with regard to the reality of the entities that scientists claim to study. It would be an incredible coincidence if all the successful predictions scientific methods achieved were to occur by chance. It all just being some happy accident that they keep nailing the behavior of the universe again and again by building theories about stuff that isn't actually real, or doesn't have any deep relationship to real things. It's certainly logically possible, but it would have to be some sort of freaking miracle. Hence, no miracles. For some philosophers, appealing to something above and beyond the predictive power of science to account for that success is unnecessary, suggesting that it doesn't really matter if atoms and gravity exist. We can just be content with knowing that scientific methods tend to be bang on the money. But scientists don't approach their work by shrugging and saying, is this real? I dunno. They get persistently accurate results by assuming realism. Maybe if we want to achieve similar success in our endeavors, we should take their lead on that one, even if it makes us some distressingly powerful philosophical enemies. Do you feel like the positive case for scientific realism justifies engaging with some of those hairy skeptical arguments? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to bubble, subscribe, watch here, and don't stop dunking.