How to Remain (Reasonably) Optimistic: Scientific Realism and the “Luminiferous Ether”

Abstract

In the course of his forceful (1981) attack on “convergent realism”, Larry Laudan attempted to turn an influential pro-realist consideration on its head. Scientific realists have wondered how a theory could enjoy the sort of empirical predictive success exhibited by presently accepted theories in the “mature” sciences, and yet be radically wrong in what it claims is going on “behind” the empirical phenomena. If nothing like the electrons and other particles postulated by current physics exists, how can the theories that there are such things have made the great range of successful predictions that they do about phenomena observed in particle accelerators and the like? Laudan directs such realists to the history of science and to a list of “once successful” theories which are “(by present lights) non-referring”—a list of successful theories which gave a “central” role to notions that, according to theories we accept now, do not exist (1981, 26).

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