Ioannis Votsis

A stalwart view in the philosophy of science holds that, even when broadly construed so as to include theoretical auxiliaries, theories cannot make direct contact with observations. This view owes much to Bogen and Woodward’s influential distinction between data and phenomena. According to them, data are typically the kind of things that are observable or measurable like "bubble chamber photographs, patterns of discharge in electronic particle detectors and records of reaction times and error rates in various psychological experiments". Phenomena are physical processes that are typically unobservable. Examples of the latter category include "weak neutral currents, the decay of the proton, and chunking and recency effects in human memory". Theories, in Bogen and Woodward’s view, are utilised to systematically explain, infer and predict phenomena, not data. The relationship between theories and data is rather indirect. Data count as evidence for phenomena and the latter in turn count as evidence for theories. This view is becoming increasingly influential, Stathis Psillos and Mauricio Suárez ). In this paper I argue contrary to this view that in various significant and well-known cases theories do make direct contact with the help of suitable auxiliaries

Empiricism has been a pivotal philosophical topic for more than two millennia. Several Sophists, Aristotle, the Epicureans, Sextus Empiricus, Francis Bacon, Locke, Hume, Mill, Mach and the Logical Empiricists represent a long line of historically influential empiricists who share a prioritising of the sensory over all other forms of knowledge. The latest influential incarnation, Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, takes science to aim at empirically adequate theories, i.e. theories that save all and only the observable phenomena. Roughly put, an object or phenomenon is observable in van Fraassen’s view if a properly functioning member of the human epistemic community can detect it via their unaided senses. Scientific realists and other critics have contested this notion citing among other reasons that most knowledge in natural science concerns objects that can only be detected with instruments, i.e. those that are unobservable and hence unknowable by van Fraassen’s lights. Beg-the-question accusations fly back and forth. As a consequence a stalemate has ensued in the scientific realism debate

A question in the philosophy of science that has engrossed the minds of many eminent thinkers is the epistemological one of what kind of knowledge, if any, science reveals of the physical world. Answers to this question are typically classified as either realist or anti-realist.1 Structural Realism, as part of its name suggests, is a position on the realist side of the divide. In very simple terms, its advocates hold that our epistemic access to the world, so far as its non-observable part is concerned, is restricted to its structural features. The position can be traced back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century and has recently been attracting renewed interest