Structural realism (philosophy of science)

Structuralism (also known as scientific structuralism or as the structuralistic theory-concept) is a research program in the philosophy of science, which was first developed in the 1970s by several analytic philosophers.

Structuralism asserts that all aspects of reality are best understood in terms of empirical scientific constructs of entities and their relations, rather than in terms of concrete entities in themselves. For instance, the concept of matter should be interpreted not as an absolute property of nature in itself, but instead of how scientifically-grounded mathematical relations describe how the concept of matter interacts with other properties, whether that be in a broad sense such as the gravitational fields that mass produces or more empirically as how matter interacts with sense systems of the body to produce sensations such as weight. Its aim is to comprise all important aspects of an empirical theory in one formal framework. The proponents of this meta-theoretic theory are Frederick Suppe, Patrick Suppes, Joseph D. Sneed, Wolfgang Stegmüller, Carlos Ulises Moulines and Wolfgang Balzer.

The philosophical concept of (scientific) structuralism is related to that of epistemic structural realism (ESR). ESR, a position originally and independently held by Henri Poincaré (1902),Bertrand Russell (1927), and Rudolf Carnap (1928), was resurrected by John Worrall, who proposes that there is retention of structure across theory change. Worrall, for example, argued that Fresnel's equations imply that light has a structure and that Maxwell's equations, which replaced Fresnel's, do also; both characterize light as vibrations. Fresnel postulated that the vibrations were in a mechanical medium called "ether"; Maxwell postulated that the vibrations were of electric and magnetic fields. The structure in both cases is the vibrations and it was retained when Maxwell's theories replaced Fresnel's. Because structure is retained, structural realism both (a) avoids 'pessimistic meta-induction' and (b) does not make the success of science seem miraculous.

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