(or at least someone with a better grip on terminology than I do)
help!
I’m trying to get a grip on what a realist theory of explanation is vs a non-realist one. This is what I have in my essay at the moment: please tell me if it’s laughably inaccurate!
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“The main disagreements seem to be based round whether the philosopher is a realist or anti-realist, and if they take a naturalist or non-naturalist view. Briefly, for realists a successful explanation should correspond to some degree with a literal truth (about reality?). Non-realists accept that a succesful explanation can be a good metaphor and not strictly(literally) true. Naturalism is the idea that all phenemona can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws, while non-naturalism argues that there are aspects of reality not contained in space and time.”
Both questions seem to me like semantics arguments (not an uncommon pitfall in philosophy or theology). The first hinges on the definition of correspond; any explanation expressed in language uses symbols to represent arbitarily defined concepts, matter groupings (objects), patterns and so on. Any explanation of a real-world phenomenon is by default ‘good enough’; there is always more complexity we don’t or can’t include in the explanation. The second depends on what you mean by ‘explain’; quantum physics is an accepted system of laws that by definition can’t predict some of the behaviour it describes; it can only specify likelyhood. If laws are allowed to quantify uncertainty at any abstraction level they can describe any and all patterns present in a system. Self-consistent systems of physical law can be forumlated for (presumably theoretical) universes without eludician geometry or linear time, so really you’re just arguing about how tight a subset of possible physical law actual reality must occupy.