Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Selective realism (SR) is the version of scientific realism most prominent in our days, and in fact the only version of realism defensible after Laudan's Pesimistic Induction (PI) criticism. SR holds that:

 (i) the part of theory's  non observational content that is responsible of successful AND novel (i.e.that the theory is not designed to accommodate) observational predictions, is (approximately) true, and

 (ii) subsequent theories that preserve such predictions also (approximately) preserve such non observational content.