HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Scientific realism is a general theory of (scientific) knowledge. In one of its forms it assumes that the world is independent of our knowledge-gathering activities and that science is the best way to explore it. Science not only produces predictions, it is also about the nature of things; it is metaphysics and engineering theory in one.

As will be shown in vol. 2, ch. 1.1 scientific realism owes its existence and its concepts to an ancient antagonism between commonsense and comprehensive theories. It arose when Greek intellectuals, guided by a love for abstractions, new kinds of stories (now called ‘arguments’) and new values for life, denied the traditional views and tried to replace them by their own accounts. It was the fight between tradition and these accounts, ‘the ancient battle between philosophy and poetry’, that led to a consideration of traditions as a whole and introduced general notions of existence and reality.

Scientific realism has had a considerable influence on the development of science. It was not only a way of describing results after they had been obtained by other means, it also provided strategies for research and suggestions for the solution of special problems. Thus Copernicus' claim that his new astronomy reflected the true arrangement of the spheres raised dynamical, methodological as well as exegetic problems (SFS, 40ff). His ideas were in conflict with physics, epistemology and theological doctrine, all of which were important boundary conditions of research.