Vigorous and controversial, this book develops a sustained argument for a realist interpretation of science, based on a new analysis of the concept of predictive novelty. Identifying a form of success achieved in science--the successful prediction of novel empirical results--which can be explained only by attributing some measure of truth to the theories that yield it, Jarrett Leplin demonstrates the incapacity of nonrealist accounts to accommodate novel success and constructs a deft realist explanation of novelty. To test the applicability of novel success as a standard of warrant for...

The unusual ambition of this volume is to engage scientists, historians, and philosophers in a common quest to delineate the structure of the creative thinking responsible for major advances in physical theory. The topic does not fit anyone discipline's proprietary interests, and can only be pursued cooperatively. This volume was conceived in the hope that the importance of learning something general about how theories are developed and what makes the difference between productive and abortive directions of theo- retical inquiry could overcome well-known barriers to such cooperation. The...

One goal of epistemology is to refute the skeptic. Another, with an equally dist- guished if briefer pedigree, is to make sense of science as a knowledge-acquiring enterprise. The goals are incompatible, in that the latter presupposes that the skeptic is wrong. The incompatibility is not strict. One could have both goals, conditi- ing the latter upon success at the former. In fact, however, epistemologies aimed at the skeptic tend not to get anywhere near science. They've got all they can handle guring out how we can know we have hands. I come to epistemology from the philosophy of science,...