engleski

Should Scientific Realists Rely on Technological Success?

Although the ‘argument from success’ is considered to be the ‘ultimate argument’ for the claim that our best scientific theories are true or at least approximately true in respect to the world which they intend to describe, in the first part of this paper I will argue that the argument loses its strength once we accept that it relies on the still widespread but false belief that technology is merely an applied science. In the second part of the paper, I will offer a more general approach to the question whether the technological success – in so far as it is the use of pure science – does indeed corroborate scientific realism, in light of what can be called the underdetermination of theories by technological applications, with which it is intended to shift the debate over the success argument from the abstract and general saving-the-phenomena domain to the real-life technologies and engineering practices, in particular in the history of nanoelectronics.

scientific realism, success argument, history of science, history of technology

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