Introduction
There is quite a large display of characterizations of realism in general and of scientific realism in particular. For the limited purpose of the present paper we shall summarize them under only two headings that we shall call “ontological” and “epistemological”.
The first qualification has its historical roots in a distinction that was introduced in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, when “realist” was the opposite of “idealist”. At that time the term “ideas” was used to denote our mental contents, our representations in general, and the question was debated whether reality has an existence independent of our cognitive activity or not. Realist were called those doctrines that assigned to reality such a mind-independent existence, and idealist those who reduced reality to the content of our cognition (the paradigmatic example of such an idealist position is the famous statement by Berkeley, esseestpercipi, that is, “to be is to be perceived”). Kant, for example, qualified himself as “empirical realist and transcendental idealist”,[8] because he maintained that sense impressions are not produced by our mind but are passively received by our sense organs, whereas the objects of our knowledge are constructed by the transcendental forms of our intellect (categories). We call ontological this sense of realism since it has to do with the existence of reality. Realism in this first sense is often called “metaphysical realism” in contemporary literature.The second meaning of the issue of realism, which we call ‘epistemological’, derived from a strange presupposition that modern philosophy adopted in epistemology: starting practically with Descartes, philosophers gave for granted that we know our representations (or ideas) and not reality but, admitting that our aim is to know reality, they asked whether we can be granted that our ideas correspond to reality.
Are considered realist in this sense those thinkers who maintain that we can attain such an (indirect) knowledge of reality.Before modernity philosophers were (with very few exceptions) realist in both senses: they admitted that reality exists independently of our knowledge, and that we know it as it is. This position, that we summarize here in a couple of words, was articulated and elaborated in details that we cannot examine here, and had produced the notion of science in a general sense, as full knowledge based on sense experience and rational deductive arguments. An obvious necessary requirement for science in that traditional sense (inaugurated by Plato and Aristotle and developed during the whole of Western “classical” philosophy) was that it is a true knowledge, but this requirement was not considered sufficient because this truth had to be also.logically justified. Such a foundation had to start from certain first principles whose intellectual evidence would provide universality, necessity and certainty to scientific knowledge. According to this view, philosophy was the highest science (the scientia prima, according to a terminology introduced by Aristotle), due to its universal scope, and for the particular sciences, the intellectual intuition of the essence of the investigated objects should constitute the starting point of the deductive justification.
But how must truth be understood? Also in this case we must note that the notion of truth has received a wide display of meanings along the history of Western philosophy that we are not certainly going to review here. Being specifically interested in the issue of scientific realism, we can restrict our attention to what we can call the “cognitive” sense of this notion, that is, to that sense which we commonly adopt in ordinary language when we qualify as true (or non-true) a given statement, or even a concept, a theory, a doctrine. Leaving aside for the moment the rather complex precisions needed for clarifying the different modalities with which it might be possible to speak of truth for those various forms of our cognition, we can note that there is a central core that all of them share when they are qualified as true, that is, the fact that they have a content that is real, that they attain reality.
Indeed we find already in Plato and then in Aristotle several almost equivalent definitions of truth regarding declarative sentences, the most synthetic of which is the following: “To say of that which is, that it is not, or of that which is not, that it is, is false; to say of that which is, that it is, or of that which is not, that it is not, is true”.[9] The force of this characterization of truth consists in its ‘double directionality'. One direction is obvious: if something is the case (is real) and we describe it faithfully in a statement, this statement is true. But also the reverse holds: if a statement is true, then what it describes is real (since no true statement can tell “what is not the case”).2
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