Do Electrons Exist? that is not the Question

Do electrons exist? Are atoms real? These are not philosophical questions.

Whether electrons exist is no more a philosophical question than whether Norwegians exist, or witches, or immaterial intelligences.

¹In my usage of such terms as “exist” or “real” I follow Quine's seminal article “On what there. is”. So ‘Xs exist' and ‘Xs are real' I understand as meaning simply that there are Xs.

B.C. van Fraassen (s)

Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University, California, USA e-mail: fraassen@sfsu.edu © Springer International Publishing AG 2017

E. Agazzi (ed.), Varieties of Scientific Realism,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51608-0_5

That is how I see it. But whether any such questions are within the scope of philosophy is itself, just as almost any other question about philosophy, something on which philosophers disagree.

Specifically, philosophers who classify themselves as scientific realists often present beliefs in the truth of certain scientific theories, theories that postulate the existence of unobservable objects or processes, as part of their philosophical position.^[19] That is puzzling, and I shall give reasons to think that this rests in a confusion about what is at issue in the scientific realism debates.

Scientific realists' inclusion of beliefs in science, when they appear, tend to be conjoined with something still more troubling: the insinuation that empiricist alternatives to scientific realism approach science skepticism. That insinuation is completely at odds with the history of empiricism, which has at every stage begun with the conviction that scientific practice is a paradigm of rational inquiry. Empiricists' skepticism toward the claims made for science in other philosophical traditions, and especially for claims involved in various forms of metaphysics purporting to extend the sciences, is not skepticism toward the empirical sciences themselves. There is an admirable degree of passion in the scientific realism debates, as is to be expected in such fundamental philosophical controversies. It is disturbing, however, to have the impression, sometimes, that some of the passion displayed derives from a scarcely hidden conviction that only scientific realism respects the achievements of the sciences, or even that it is, so to speak, secularly impious not to profess emphatically one's belief in the reality of currently discussed unobservable, scientifically postulated entities.

To free the discussion from such bedevilment, let us consider anew the question what scientific realism is (although it has received so many answers), to see if we can clearly and distinctly separate it from any disputes about whether atoms, electrons, or other theoretically postulated entities are real.

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