Ontological Structural Realism and van Fraassen’s Criticism

In this paper, we first provide an overview of the debate between realism and antirealism in the philosophy of science; then, we introduce John Worrall’s structural realism as a middle position in this debate. Structural realism is, roughly speaking, the view that our scientific knowledge only concerns the structure of the world. However, James Ladyman goes beyond this by defending a thesis called ontic structural realism (OSR) and arguing that the world itself is nothing but structure. In the three sections after the introduction (2, 3, and 4), we define OSR more precisely, study some of the motivations and arguments in its favor, and distinguish its main versions. Nevertheless, after providing his own formulation of OSR, Bas van Fraassen, the prominent philosopher of science, claims that this view is inherently paradoxical. We argue that his argument for this claim is not conclusive. To do this, we introduce, reconstruct, and then take issue with van Fraassen’s criticism in the next two sections (5 and 6). Not only are the assumptions of his criticism disputable, but we will see that van Fraassen’s simple formulation of OSR may be useful to proponents of this view, who are often accused of ambiguity and imprecision. Although we note a serious shortcoming in van Fraassen’s formulation, in the last section (7) before the conclusion, we will briefly show that perhaps another philosopher - Shamik Dasgupta- has successfully provided a more or less similar formulation of structuralism, without such a shortcoming.