Extragalactic Reality Revisited: Astrophysics and Entity Realism

Abstract

AbstractAstrophysics is a scientific field with a rich ontology of individual processes and general phenomena that occur in our universe. Despite its central role in our understanding of the physics of the universe, astrophysics has largely been ignored in the debate on scientific realism. As a notable exception, Hacking (Philos Sci 56(4):555–581, 1989) argues that the lack of experiments in astrophysics forces us to be anti-realist with respect to the entities which astrophysics claim inhabit the universe. In this paper, I investigate the viability of astrophysical realism about black holes, given other formulations of entity realism, specifically Cartwright’s (How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford University Press, 1983), and Chakravartty’s (A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobervable. Cambridge University Press, 2007) versions of entity realism. I argue that on these accounts of entity realism, you cannot be a realist with respect to black holes, and likewise, if you want to be a realist about black holes, you cannot be an entity realist of these particular strands.