Our science is necessarily perspectival and rooted in metaphor. Like maps, these metaphors are useful, but we shouldn't mistake the map for the territory, writes Andrew Reynolds.
There is a very common view of science, one is inclined to call it the ‘common sensical’ view, that depicts science as the objective description of reality, telling us what kinds of things there are in the world and how they work. We then apply that objective knowledge to create new technologies and medical therapies and so on.
According to this common-sense view, there is a world ‘out there’ that exists independent of our theories and beliefs about it, and this objective reality has its own inherent structure or ‘way that it is.’ The philosopher Hilary Putnam referred to this as a ‘ready-made world’, which is a component thesis of what he called metaphysical realism. This is closely aligned with the position known as scientific realism, which holds that it is science’s job to discover what this way is and to describe it in objectively true terms.
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