How far can the concept of realism be extended?
“Metaphysically, realism is committed to the mind-independent existence of the world investigated by the sciences” A more compact definition would be to say that “the real world exists independent of our consciousness”
We then note that the - constantly evolving - theories about the world are disqualified as reality by their dependence of our consciousness.
We may accept that a theory or a description of the world would be independent of or consciousness if it was absolutely correct, such as we might imagine a theory from a thousand - or a million - years into the future to be resented, perhaps with a proof that the theory could not be improved in any way. Our definition might perhaps not exclude such an accompanying theory.
Today however we see that philosophical realists go far beyond the definition above, and indeed not only include the study of theories but also seem to include this practice in the concept reality.
I believe that the first, true-to-the-letter interpretation can be valuable in its own right. The example I want to give, at the expense of some text volume, is the following:
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In the field of nuclear activities, in particular nuclear high level waste disposal (my area or work) the polarization implies that people call for not only correct answers but often absolute correctness, the experts don’t have that, and most often do not understand the theory around the matter.
In 1995 the US National Academy of Science, NAS, issued a report called “Technical Bases for Yucca Mountain Standard”, in which the answered several question from Congress (with a history we must leave out). One was related to calculation of probability of (distant) future inadvertent human intrusion into a closed repository. It was a leading question and NAS held, as expected, that it was not possible. This led to a full stop in a series of international studies because of the weight of the US in this area. (It was a bit like saying to the military: since you cannot predict scientifically the probability of an attack, we must stop all funding for defense contracts.)
The US Congress understood that a (human-) disturbed nuclear repository defies calculation, and Congress then assumed the opposite was the case for an undisturbed (by intrusion) repository, i.e. its future performance could be calculated which resulted in the tern “The repository’s probable behavior”. It was assessed in a process called the “Total System Performance Assessment” TSPA. This was in itself assessed by a panel led by Chris Whipple, former head of an internal group in NAS studying waste management. I quote from the panel’s report
“With the benefit of hindsight, the Panel finds that, at the present time, an assessment of the future probable behavior of the proposed repository may be beyond the analytical capabilities of any scientific and engineering team. This is due to the complexity of the system and the nature of the data that now exist or that could be obtained within a reasonable time and cost.”
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I cite this example to show that (at least in extreme cases) reality cannot be described using theories and models, and I claim that this result is independent of theories and models used by others in the example. I present it as a result of the value of the use of the narrow definition of scientific realism.
According to Wikipedia Entity realism is “(also selective realism), sometimes equated with referential realism, is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism”.
My question here is do you agree that most philosophers such as Cartwright and her critics and many others include more than realism in the concept while the discussion is still said to be about scientific realism?
