Against Correspondence: A Constructivist View of Experiment and the Real

Abstract

This paper is about realism. The ideas presented were developed as part of a response to a persistent criticism levelled against the relativist/constructivist programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), namely that this programme fails to allow the real any role in the articulation of scientific thought. This criticism I believe to be mistaken, and justified, if at all, only by the relative silence of the SSK tradition on the role of the real. To indicate that this silence is a contingent, rather than a necessary attribute of the tradition, my aim here is to explore what can be said about the relation between the real and the articulated on the basis of empirical studies of scientific practice. To situate what follows, let me note that the standard philosophical debate on realism concerns the reality, or lack of it, of unobservable entities appearing in well confirmed theories (Leplin 1984).

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