Relativity of Theory

This book offers a close and rigorous examination ofthe arguments for and against scientific realism and introduces key positions in the scientific realism/antirealism debate, which is one of the central debates in contemporary philosophy of science. On the one hand, scientific realists argue that we have goodreasons to believe that our best scientific theories are approximately true because, if theywere not even approximately true, they would not be able to explain and predict naturalphenomena with such impressive accuracy. On the other hand, antirealists argue that thesuccess of science does not warrant belief in the approximate truth of our best scientifictheories. This is because the history of science is a graveyard of theories that were oncesuccessful but were later discarded. The author eventually settles on a middle-groundposition between scientific realism and antirealism called "relative realism".