Abstract
Do physicists believe that general relativity is true, and that electrons and phonons exist, and if so, in what sense? To what extent does the spectrum of positions among physicists correspond to philosophical positions like scientific realism, instrumentalism, or perspectivism? Does agreement with these positions correlate with demographic factors, and are realist physicists more likely to support research projects purely aimed at increasing knowledge? We conducted a questionnaire study to scrutinize the philosophical stances of physicists. We received responses from 384 physicists and 151 philosophers. Our main findings are (1) On average, physicists tend toward scientific realism, and slightly more so than philosophers of science. (2) Physicists can be clustered into five groups. Three show variants of scientific realism, one is instrumentalist, and one seems undecided or incoherent. (3) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with approval of building a bigger particle collider. (4) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with the seniority of physicists. (5) We did not find correlations with other factors, such as whether physicists focus on theoretical or experimental research and whether they engage with applied or basic research.
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The full question catalogue, all the study’s anonymized data, detailed results, and all analysis scripts are publicly available on Mendeley Data: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/w2pfxfj9gb/1.
Notes
We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
We chose not to include constructive empiricism in our list of philosophical positions, even if it is generally considered to be the other influential form of antirealism in the literature. This position was tested in Beebe and Dellsén’s questionnaire, who found that the two statements did not cluster with other realist or antirealist statements (Beebe and Dellsén 2020, 354), suggesting that van Fraassen’s position “may not connect in substantial ways with the broad set of issues involved in other discussions of scientific realism” (359).
For example, Hasok Chang’s “active pluralism,” which consists in “keep[ing] multiple systems of knowledge alive,” and “facilitat[ing] productive interactions between them through integration, co-optation and competition” (Chang 2012, xx).
Note that discrepancies between the sum across all categories and the total number of physicists were due to very few participants that skipped the corresponding questions.
We would like to note that a few combinations of views were surprising. In particular, four philosopher participants combined scientific realism with instrumentalism, two combined it with social constructionism, and two with constructive empiricism.
According to their study, the “Standard Scientific Realism Score” of physicists is 5.6 out of 7, while that of HPS and STS scholars is 4.6 out of 7 (Beebe and Dellsén, 348, Fig. 5).
Nevertheless, Rowbottom’s version of instrumentalism will have difficulties accommodating the claim that “Electrons are (at least) as real as toe-nails and volcanoes”.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Hasok Chang for helpful feedback on a previous draft of the manuscript and for providing funding for the voucher prizes. Thanks also go to Anna Alexandrova, Paolo Andrich, Hope Bretscher, Kai Freund, Lorenzo Perrone, and participants of Hasok Chang’s working group for their feedback on early versions of the questionnaire.
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The research was conducted with doctoral awards from Arts and Humanities Research Council and Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust [Award number 2,090,146].
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Hannah Tomczyk and Céline Henne contributed equally to the elaboration of the questionnaire and philosophical discussion of the questionnaire and results in all sections of the manuscript. Christoph Sperber conducted all statistical analyses and wrote the technical parts of Sections 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 of the manuscript, and made figures and tables.
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Henne, C., Tomczyk, H. & Sperber, C. Physicists’ views on scientific realism. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 14, 10 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-024-00570-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-024-00570-z