> On Sunday, August 31, 2003, at 02:03 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>> There is no necessary connection between doing science and
>> being a "scientific realist" (Reichenbach).
>
> Well, I'm not a scientist, but I think I would find it rather hard to
> work on, say, quarks, day after day and not think that they were real. I
> don't think many scientists think that what they are studying are
> figments of their own imaginations.
I think Miles's point is true, but only in a very pedantic sense. Yes, one could perform scientific research, and hold the opinion that it's just some interesting arrangement of data. This might even help analyzing things in an abstract way. It's possible.
But it's just not _likely_. By and large, scientists _don't_ think that these are all just fictions that they're playing with. After all, the test for any scientific theory is how well it conforms (and predicts) the behavior of the real world. Even mathematicians, whose work rests upon internal consistency more than experimental data, and who routinely work up alternate forms of math that even run _counter_ to our common sense views of the world, regard numbers as _real things_ which real properties and real behaviors.