Lunchtime Talk - Tushar Menon 10/4/24

Title: Scientific realism as a normative notion (twice over)
Abstract: The semantic component of standard scientific realism-sometimes called semantic realism-is the view that the semantic treatment of scientific-theoretical terms should be the same as that of observational terms. This is to be understood, roughly, as the claim that theoretical claims are descriptive just as observational claims are. But standard semantic realism does not say anything about why we are right to treat observational claims as descriptive in the first place. In this talk, I argue that the justification of the descriptive deployment of observational terms is best understood from a normative pragmatist perspective, in terms of what we can use such discourse to do. I thus construe semantic realism as the claim that this is also the way to assess the correctness of the descriptive deployment of scientific-theoretical terms. I then argue that descriptive deployment is itself to be understood normatively, in terms of a Sellars-Brandom-style inferentialism. The upshot is (i) that we can do much more justice to the impulses that motivate scientific realism, and (ii) assess the relative merits of scientific realism across a wider domain of scientific theories (in particular mathematised physics) if we understand it in this doubly normative sense.