Abstract

Scientific theories have changed over time. Throughout the history of science, existing theories have regularly been rejected in favor of completely different ones. This chapter considers the challenge this fact poses to scientific realism, the view that scientific theories tell us about what the world is really like. Scientific theories seem to give us deep knowledge of the world around and within us, but there are reasons to doubt whether we can ultimately know that claims involving the theoretical posits at their core are true. Nonetheless, challenges to scientific realism shouldn’t lead us to question whether we have scientific knowledge at all. There is a puzzle about how best to make sense of science’s role in knowledge and understanding, but this is not reason to question whether science is a trustworthy source of knowledge.