Timothy D. Lyons is Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He has numerous publications on the scientific realism debate in, for instance, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. He is the author of Scientific Realism: Elements in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Peter Vickers is Associate Professor and Reader in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Understanding Inconsistent Science (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the Associate Editor of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. He has several publications on the scientific realism debate in, for instance, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Synthese, and The European Journal for Philosophy of Science.

• Chapter 1. Introduction, Timothy D. Lyons and Peter Vickers


• Part I: Historical Cases for the Debate


• Chapter 2. Theoretical Continuity, Approximate Truth, and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction: Revisiting the Miasma Theory, Dana Tulodziecki


• Chapter 3. What Can the Discovery of Boron Tell Us About the Scientific Realism Debate?, Jonathon Hricko


• Chapter 4. No Miracle After All: The Thomson Brothers' Novel Prediction that Pressure Lowers the Freezing Point of Water, Keith Hutchison


• Chapter 5. From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence: Descartes, Newton, and Beyond, Stathis Psillos


• Chapter 6. How Was Nicholson's Proto-Element Theory Able to Yield Explanatory as well as Predictive Success?, Eric R. Scerri


• Chapter 7. Selective Scientific Realism and Truth-Transfer in Theories of Molecular Structure, Amanda J. Nichols and Myron A. Penner


• Chapter 8. Realism, Physical Meaningfulness, and Molecular Spectroscopy, Teru Miyake and George E. Smith


• Part II: Contemporary Scientific Realism


• Chapter 9. The Historical Challenge to Realism and Essential Deployment, Mario Alai


• Chapter 10. Realism, Instrumentalism, Particularism: A Middle Path Forward in the Scientific Realism Debate, Kyle Stanford


• Chapter 11. Structure not Selection, James Ladyman


• Chapter 12. The Case of the Consumption Function: Structural Realism in Macroeconomics, Jennifer Jhun


• Chapter 13. We Think, They Thought: A Critique of the Pessimistic Meta-Meta Induction, Ludwig Fahrbach


• Chapter 14. The Paradox of Infinite Limits: A Realist Response, Patricia Palacios and Giovanni Valente


• Chapter 15. Realist Representations of Particles: The Standard Model, Top Down, and Bottom Up, Anjan Chakravartty


• Index

Contemporary Scientific Realism brings together the most important lessons from the history of science to explain scientific realism. The expert contributors introduce and assess topics that redefine what we know about the philosophy of science.