Empiricist Structuralism, Metaphysical Realism, and the Bridging Problem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1. Scientific realism (or at least one version of it) can be characterized as the conjunction of three theses, which, following Stathis Psillos (2000), I shall call the metaphysical, the semantic and the epistemological theses. The metaphysical thesis (or, as it is often referred to, metaphysical realism) is the thesis that the world is (largely) independent from our way of representing or describing it. The semantic thesis is that our scientific theories are literal descriptions of the world and are capable of being true or false. The epistemological thesis is that we are epistemically justified in believing that our best scientific theories are (approximately) true.1Scientific antirealism, on the other hand, is the denial of at least one of the above theses. Whereas scientific antirealists in the past often rejected the metaphysical or the semantic theses, in the last few decades, the debate between scientific realists and antirealists has mostly focused on the epistemological thesis. This development can be largely attributed to the influence that Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism has exerted on the debate since the publication of The Scientific Image in 1980. Constructive empiricism has since represented a moderate and sensible alternative to scientific realism, which challenged scientific realists mostly on the epistemological ground, while making substantial concessions on the metaphysical and the semantic grounds by essentially accepting the metaphysical and the semantic theses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".