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Neither Truth Nor Empirical Adequacy Explain Novel Success

This paper is focused on two widely discussed theses in the philosophy of science—these are realism and predictivism. Realism, as I shall construe it here, is the view that the theories of the so-called mature sciences are at least approximately true. Realists also typically hold that scientists have the ability to systematically identify and accept theories that are approximately true. Anti-realism is a sceptical position that repudiates the possibility of theoretical knowledge and holds that the empirical success of contemporary theories is no reason to regard them as approximately true. Predictivism is the view that novel confirmations of theories confirm theories more strongly than non-novel confirmations. A great deal has been written about what constitutes a novel confirmation. The temporal conception of novelty was apparently adopted by Lakatos in his influential (1970) paper, which claims that a true empirical consequence E of a theory T amounts to a novel confirmation of T if E comes to be known after T was formulated. Zahar (1973) countered that what mattered was not whether E was known at the relevant time but whether E was one of the empirical facts that T was intended to address. We will follow a more currently popular trend and say that the case in which T entails some true observation statement E amounts to a novel confirmation of T insofar as T was not ‘built to fit’ E (or, as it is often put, knowledge of E was not ‘used’ in the construction of T). Both predictivism and realism are the foci of large philosophical literatures. Realism has been a fairly popular philosophical position since the demise of positivism in the 1960s and philosophers continue to defend it (such as Leplin (1997) and Psillos (1999)) despite the existence of powerful anti-realist positions such as van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism. Perhaps the most famous proponent of a predictivist-like position (though hardly the first) was Karl Popper who emphasized that confirmations count only when