The Reality of the Unobservable

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Evandro Agazzi, Massimo Pauri

      Pages 1-29

3. History

   1. The Origin of Scientific Realism: Boltzmann, Planck, Einstein

      • Erhard Scheibe

      Pages 31-44

4. General Philosophy, Scientific Realism

   1. Observability and Referentiality

      • Evandro Agazzi

      Pages 45-57

   2. A New Approach to Human Cognition and its Significance for the Philosophy of Science

      • Paul M. Churchland

      Pages 59-85

   3. Abduction and Non-Observability

      • Jean-Pierre Desclés

      Pages 87-112

   4. ‘Scientific Realism’ and Scientific Practice

      • Roberto Torretti

      Pages 113-122

   5. Random Philosophy

      • Peter Galison

      Pages 123-128

   6. Formal Representation and the Subjective Side of Scientific Realism

      • Mario Casartelli

      Pages 129-135

   7. Convention and Observability

      • Gerhard Heinzmann

      Pages 137-144

   8. Scientific Realism, Objectivity, and ‘Technological Realism’

      • Ramón Queraltó

      Pages 145-151

5. Philosophy of Observation

   1. Testability and Empiricism

      • Dudley Shapere

      Pages 153-164

   2. Observing the Unobservable

      • Jan Faye

      Pages 165-175

   3. What does it Mean to Observe Physical Reality?

      • Giovanni Boniolo

      Pages 177-190

   4. Realism, and the Case of Rival Theories without Observable Differences

      • Alberto Cordero

      Pages 191-206

   5. Measurability, Computability and the Existence of Theoretical Entities

      • Mauro Dorato

      Pages 207-217

   6. Observation, Construction and Speculation in Cosmology

      • Jesús Mosterίn

      Pages 219-229

   7. Where Did the Notion that Forces are Unobservable Come from?

      • Mark Wilson

      Pages 231-239

6. Philosophy of Quantum Theory

   1. Quantum Mechanics without the Observables

      • Nancy Cartwright

      Pages 241-249

   2. Observation, Contextuality, and Realism

      • Bernard D’Espagnat

      Pages 251-255

Observability and Scientific Realism It is commonly thought that the birth of modern natural science was made possible by an intellectual shift from a mainly abstract and specuJative conception of the world to a carefully elaborated image based on observations. There is some grain of truth in this claim, but this grain depends very much on what one takes observation to be. In the philosophy of science of our century, observation has been practically equated with sense perception. This is understandable if we think of the attitude of radical empiricism that inspired Ernst Mach and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, who powerfully influenced our century's philosophy of science. However, this was not the atti tude of the f ounders of modern science: Galileo, f or example, expressed in a f amous passage of the Assayer the conviction that perceptual features of the world are merely subjective, and are produced in the 'anima!' by the motion and impacts of unobservable particles that are endowed uniquely with mathematically expressible properties, and which are therefore the real features of the world. Moreover, on other occasions, when defending the Copernican theory, he explicitly remarked that in admitting that the Sun is static and the Earth turns on its own axis, 'reason must do violence to the sense' , and that it is thanks to this violence that one can know the tme constitution of the universe.

• Cosmology
• EFE
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Immanuel Kant
• Philosophy of Science
• Quantum mechanics
• experience
• mind
• objectivity

• Department of Philosophy, University of Genoa, Italy

  Evandro Agazzi

• Department of Physics (Theoretical Division), University of Parma, Italy

  Massimo Pauri

Policies and ethics