So, coming back to the theme of today's session, we saw in Galileo [unknown]
example of someone that believed that the aim of science was not just to save the
appearances, but to provide us with the true story about the world.
Now, this view is known in the philosophy of science literature as scientific
realism. Scientific realism says that the aim of
science is to provide us with theories which, literally construed, we believe to
be true. There are two different aspects in this
definition. The first is a semantic aspect.
It has to do with the language of science, the language in which our theories are
formulated. And he basically says that we should take
the language of science of face value, so if we have a theory, say, Copernican
astronomy, that talks about planets, we should understand the term planet as
referring, as speaking about objects in the external world, same for any other
theoretical terms. If we have a theory about electrons, we
should understand the term electron as referring, as speaking out electrons in
the world. There is a, a separate aspect, which is an
epistemic aspect. And that says that whenever we accept a
scientific theory, we believe that the theory is true, or at least approximately
true. In other words, whatever the theory says
about those objects, be they're planets or electrons, correspond to facts in the
external world. Now, appealing and intuitive as this may
sound, as we have just seen with Ptolemy and Simplicius and Osiander, this was not
the way in which for many centuries science was conceived.
So, we need a proper philosophical argument for scientific queries, and, and
the argument is known as the no miracles argument.
So, in the original formulation of Hilary Putnam, the no miracles argument says that
scientific realism is the only philosophy that does not make the success of science
a miracle. The terms were fair, the theories are
approximately true that the same term can refer to the same objects even if the
course in different scientific theories, these statements are the only explanation
of the incredible success of our science. So, an actual account of how science grows
and unfolds, say, how the way in which Newtonian mechanics replaced [unknown]
physics, or Copernican astronomy replaced for the [unknown] astronomy, or Einstein
relativity theory replaced Newtonian mechanics.
It's that a partially correct, partially incorrect account of a given object is
replaced by a better account of the same object.
But the no miracle argument says, if the object don't exist, if our theories were
not really true or at least approximately true of the same objects, then it would be
just a miracle that we have a theory like Newtonian mechanics that talks about
gravitational attraction and is so successful in predicting phenomena.
If curved space time didn't exist, then it would be just a miracle that a theory like
Einstein relativity proves so successful again in predicting phenomena like the
[unknown] Mercury, and so on. In other words, one must be a scientific
realist in order to explain the incredible success of our science across century.