Deeper explorations of scientific realism in the wild

Building upon previous investigations of scientific realism “in the wild” – i.e., among practicing scientists – we report the results of an empirical study that examined the attitudes of scientists from physics, biology, psychology, and anthropology (N = 777) toward various issues in the scientific realism debate. Out of all the major issues that have fallen under the heading of scientific realism, we found that the mind-independence of scientific phenomena and the ideas that comprise the no-miracles argument were most central to scientists’ thinking about this cluster of issues and that ideas pertaining to instrumentalism and the pessimistic induction were least central. We also found that scientists’ judgments about the status of unobservable entities posited in their fields failed to cohere with their responses to other issues in the debate and that the fields where scientists most strongly endorsed realism on the whole were the ones that expressed the most skepticism about unobservables. Additionally, we found that scientists were significantly inclined toward realism, with natural scientists being more so than social scientists, and that this inclination was generally accompanied by a modestly antirealist endorsement of the pessimistic induction. Implications of these findings for the philosophical debate over scientific realism are considered.