Science is undeniably great as a predictive tool. But it’s also full of idealizations – false claims in the form of simplification, exaggeration, and outright distortion. That would seem to rule out scientific realism, the idea that science manages to uncover the fundamental structure of reality. But Elay Shech argues that by contextualizing scientific claims relative to scale and internal standards of a theory, scientific realism can still be defended.

Science is our best epistemic enterprise; it is our best source of knowledge, explanation, and understanding, and it would seem irrational not to believe in its claims. Science also tells us amazing things about the world. It tells us that all matter is made up of fundamental entities too small for the naked eye to see. That there can be correlations between these unobservable entities, particles like electrons, even if they are light years apart. We learn about the properties and behaviors of, or patterns associated with, such unobservables. For instance, electrons have a particular mass, spin, and negative charge, they are deflected in magnetic and electric fields in specific ways, they repulse each other in accordance with Coulomb’s inverse-square law, and so on.

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Yet, an integral part of what fuels science’s ability for learning about the world are idealizations. In fact, idealizations are ubiquitous in science. They are distortions or false claims that enter into our best theories, laws, models, and scientific representations. Examples include infinite populations, perfectly rational agents, non-viscous fluid flow, the Bohr model of the atom, Schelling's model of segregation, etc. Science, ostensibly, discovers truth by appealing to lies (in the form of idealizations).