Realism is an enlightening story, a tale which enriches our experience and makes it more intelligible. Yet this wonderful picture of humanity’s best efforts at knowledge has been badly bruised by numerous critics. James Robert Brown in Smoke and Mirrors fights back against figures such as Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, Michael Ruse and Hilary Putnam who have attacked realist accounts of science. But this volume is not wholly devoted to combating Rorty and others who blow smoke in our eyes, the second half is concerned with arguing that there are some amazing ways in which science mirrors the world. The role of abstraction, abstract objects and a priori ways of getting at reality are all explored in showing how science reflects reality. Smoke and Mirrors is a defence of science and knowledge in general as well as a defence of a particular way of understanding science. It is of interest to all those who wish or need to know how science works. ~ Product Description

Table of Contents

• • Preface
  • Acknowledgements
• 1    Explaining the success of science    3
  • Miracles, Darwin and ‘the truth’    5
  • The Darwinian answer    6
  • Realism and reference    8
  • Realism and verisimilitude    10
  • Is hypothetico-deductivism the problem?    13
  • Fine’s ontological attitude    15
  • Why truth matters (a little)    18
  • Narrative explanations    21
• 2    Rorty’s Solidarity    29
  • Unforced agreement    29
  • Russell’s promiscuity    31
  • Kuhn    33
  • From God to Gauss    34
  • Arguments and pictures    39
• 3    Latour’s prosaic science    41
• 4    The naturalism of Ruse    60
  • Naturalism and evolution    60
  • Epistemology    61
  • Ethics    67
  • Evidence    70
• 5    Putnam’s verification    78
  • Putnam’s pilgrimage    78
  • Truth and rational acceptability    79
  • Defining realism    81
  • Internal realism    83
  • Natural kinds    84
  • Relativism    85
  • A final note    88
• 6    Knowledge – in the abstract    91
  • Laws of nature    91
  • Knowledge of laws    98
  • Causal empiricism    100
  • EPR and the Bell results    102
  • The upshot    110
  • The argument so far    112
  • Thought experiments    113
• 7    Phenomena    117
  • Phenomena and data    117
  • Phenomena and natural kinds    125
  • Diagrams    128
  • Phenomena and values    130
  • Thought experiments    131
  • Phenomena and inference    133
  • The structure of data    136
  • Feynman diagrams    138
  • Concluding remarks    140
• 8    What is the vector potential?    142
• 9    Proof and truth in the abstract realm    160
  • Proofs    163
  • The later methodology    172
  • Definition and ontology    173
  • Afterword    184
  • Notes    185
  • Bibliography    189
  • Index    196