A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable, by Anjan Chakravartty.

In A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism, Anjan Chakravartty attempts the difficult task of bringing metaphysical debates about properties, causation, and natural kinds into a meaningful engagement with epistemological debates about scientific realism. Overall, he does an excellent job, and for that reason alone, this book is worth reading. Chakravartty’s primary aim is to defend a theory that he calls ‘semirealism’, which is effectively a metaphysically enriched variant of structural realism (SR). Structural realists, like all realists, regard successful scientific theories as likely to be true. But they are selective in which parts of scientific theories they treat in this way. They suggest that we should treat only claims about the structure of reality as true. Claims about the ‘nature’ of reality — in contrast — should be regarded as much less epistemically secure. Epistemic structural realists endorse the existence of non-structural features of reality, but maintain scepticism that we know about these features. Ontic structural realists take the more radical step of denying the existence of such non-structural entities.