Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2024 number 2

The article considers varieties of effective realism (ER) in the philosophy of physics. J. Ladyman and L. Lorenzetti propose to eliminate the problems faced by ER versions, improve them, and unify them through effective ontic structural realism (OSR). In our view, (effective) OSR contains important intuitions but is not a genuine realism. It shares with standard scientific realism the metaphysical assumption of the existence of an external world and representationalism. We propose an alternative: contextual realism (CR). CR asserts the categorical distinction between ideal norms and the reality in which they are anchored, the sensitivity of ontology to context and, consequently, rejects the modal realism of OSR. We establish a correspondence between effective OSR and CR, which rids OSR of speculative metaphysics. The structure corresponds to the Wittgensteinian rule/norm (Wrule). Real patterns are contextual entities identified by the Wittgensteinian rule within the language games of its applications. Scale relativity of ontology is a special case of ontology’s sensitivity to context. CR offers a better solution to the problems of theoretical relicts, theory change and pessimistic (meta)induction than either ERs or effective OSR do. Our interpretation of (effective) OSR in terms of CR is consistent with D. Wallace’s mathematicsfirst approach and some other new interpretations of OSR.