Scientific realism and inconsistencies. Critique to Colyvan's metaphysics

• Autor(a) principal: Guirado, Matías Alejandro
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: spa
• Título da fonte: Acta Scientiarum. Human and Social Sciences (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/ActaSciHumanSocSci/article/view/27157
• topic: scientific realism; inconsistent entities; Quine; scientific methodology; Mark Colyvan; realismo científico; entidades inconsistentes; Quine; metodología de la ciencia; Mark Colyvan.

According to Mark Colyvan, certain mature scientific developments (specifically, Newtonian cosmology, descriptive oceanography, early calculus and Dirac's quantum theory) contain contradictory assumptions, and this enables the prima facie adoption of certain naturalized realism of inconsistent entities. An exotic aspect of Colyvan's proposal is the claim that the resulting variety of realism emerges from the mere application of the parameters of theory evaluation involved in Quine's epistemology. While this is a highly controversial claim in itself, it will not be analyzed in this paper. My intention is to show that the theories put forward by Colyvan do not exhibit the properties required to promote a philosophically respectable metaphysics of contradictory entities. The theses defended are: (i) neither Newtonian cosmology nor descriptive oceanography exhibits any genuine contradiction; (ii) the apparent inconsistencies in early calculus and Dirac's quantum theory respectively exhibit a weak enough methodological effectivity so that their use do not rationally demand a realistic recovery.