Personal Identity, Free Will, and Contemporary Political Thought

Contemporary philosophy of science extended Popper's and Kuhn's debates about scientific method into a further dispute over scientific realism, the question of whether we should believe that our best scientific theories are at least approximately true descriptions of a mind-independent reality, including its unobservable entities such as electrons or quarks. Realists commonly appeal to the 'no-miracles argument,' associated with philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, which holds that the extraordinary predictive and technological success of mature scientific theories would be an inexplicable miracle unless those theories were at least approximately true and genuinely tracked the structure of an independent reality. Anti-realists respond with the 'pessimistic meta-induction,' the observation that the history of science is littered with once highly successful theories, such as Newtonian mechanics or the caloric theory of heat, that were later judged false or radically revised, suggesting current theories may meet the same fate. Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism offered an influential middle path, holding that the aim of science is only empirical adequacy, correctly predicting observable phenomena, while remaining agnostic about the literal truth of claims concerning unobservable entities, whose existence science need not, and perhaps cannot, settle.