[MD] check for yourself: scientific realism

[MarshaV]

     "What relevance does the term scientific realism have for those of us who are not professional philosophers of science?  Check for yourself what sort of perspective you have on scientific assertions, regardless of your philosophy.  As you look at this page, you see a sheet of white paper with black markings on it.  Touch the page with a finger and feel its smooth texture and its relative coolness or warmth.  Now sit back and ask yourself:  do I think of the whiteness, texture, and coolness of the paper as qualities of this material existing in it independent of my senses?  Do those qualities exist "out there," in or on the paper, unrelated to my awareness of them?  

   "They certainly seem to be attributes inherent to the paper, and if we believe that they exist in that way, then we are adherents of everyday realism.  There are problems, however, in this viewpoint.  If we assert that such qualities exist out there as they appear to, we are implicitly assuming that our visual and tactile sense faculties play an utterly passive role in the perception of them.  That is, these faculties would act simply as clear windows through which color, texture, and coolness flow from the object to the perceiving subject.  Much research has gone into studying the functioning of our sense faculties, but none of it has led to the assertion that they function passively as simple receptors of objective color, texture, sound, and so on.  Moreover, if we reflect on the wide range of visual faculties of fish, insects, birds, and mammals, for instance, it seems exceedingly hard to believe that they all se the world in the same way.  What they see is created in part by the specific types of visual organs that they have. 
 
   "Now a new question is raised:  if the above sensory impressions exist only in relation to the subjective senses, what is really out there that causes our senses to be stimulated so that we perceive colors and so forth?  In other words, what is the nature of the real world as it exists independent of human perceptions?  What is truly out there?  This question has been asked by thinkers of Greek antiquity, and since then a myriad of theories have been devised to describe and explain the nature of such reality.  These range from thoroughgoing idealism to materialism, and insofar as we adopt any such theory, we become adherents of _transcendental realism_:  we believe in a theory about the real, intrinsic nature of the world as it exists behind the veil of the senses.  It is a metaphysical perspective that purportedly transcends sensory appearances and reaches the inherent nature of reality that lies beyond.  

   "Do we believe that the real, objective nature of color pertains to a certain range of frequencies of electromagnetic waves?  Objectively speaking, is sound another form of wave pattern that moves through various media such as the atmosphere and water?  Are warmth and coolness really a matter of kinetic energy of random movements of molecules that make up the physical world?   It transcends the misleading, subjective impressions of the senses and penetrates to the objective reality that exists independent of perception.   
 
   "While scientific realism as defined above is no longer considered tenable by most philosophers of science, it is still the metaphysical view that saturates most instruction in science today.  Yet this metaphysical stance is rarely mentioned in classrooms or the popular media when discussing scientific theories.  It is simply taken for granted: a metaphysical viewpoint that is regarded by philosophers as highly problematic is absorbed unconsciously and uncritically.  It nevertheless exerts a powerful influence on the thoughts and attitudes of those that hold them."    

	  (Wallace, B. Alan, 'Choosing Reality, : A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind', 2003, pp.46-48)
 
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