Scientific Realism versus Anti-Realism

Scientific realism is the position, defended in its modern analytic form chiefly from the 1960s onward by philosophers including J.J.C. Smart, Grover Maxwell, and later Richard Boyd, that our best, most mature scientific theories are at least approximately true descriptions of a mind-independent reality, including its unobservable entities and structures — electrons, quarks, DNA molecules, and spacetime curvature are held to genuinely exist and to possess, roughly, the properties current theory attributes to them, rather than being mere convenient calculating devices or useful fictions. Hilary Putnam's "no miracles" argument, presented in Philosophy of Logic (1971) and later refined, contends that scientific realism is the best, indeed the only non-miraculous, explanation of the otherwise startling predictive and technological success of mature science: were our best theories' unobservable posits not at least approximately accurate, Putnam argued, the sustained empirical and practical success of the theories built on them would amount to an inexplicable series of coincidences.