Realism bit by bit: Part II. Disjunctive partial reference [An article from: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science]

This digital document is a journal article from Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.Description: In this second paper, I continue my discussion of the problem of reference for scientific realism. First, I consider a final objection to Kitcher's account of reference, which I generalise to other accounts of reference. Such accounts make attributions of reference by appeal to our pretheoretical intuitions about how true statements ought to be distibuted among the scientific utterances of the past. I argue that in the cases that merit discussion, this strategy fails because our intuitions are unstable. The interesting cases are importantly b