Ioannis Votsis: Structural Invariance through Theory Change

Structural realism is an influential programme in the scientific realism debate. It has various diverse manifestations and for this reason it is difficult to characterise on neutral grounds. To give you a taste of one manifestation, epistemic structural realism holds that successful scientific theories at best give us an isomorphic description of the world. Despite their differences, what structural realists of nearly all stripes have in common is their endorsement of what I call 'the structural continuity claim'. Roughly, this is the idea that the structure of successful scientific theories survives theory change because it has latched on to the structure of the world. In this talk I elaborate, elucidate and modify the structural continuity claim and its associated argument. I do so without presupposing a particular conception of structure that favours this or that kind of structural realism but instead by concentrating on neutrally formulated historical facts. The result, I hope, crystallises some of the shared commitments, desiderata and limits of structural realists and sheds light on the scientific enterprise.