Soru

Passage A
The profound technological and predictive success of modern physics presents a persistent philosophical puzzle: how do our mature scientific theories manage to be so extraordinarily accurate in their descriptions of the natural world? Scientific realism provides the most compelling framework for this, offering the only explanation that does not render the astonishing success of science a massive, inexplicable coincidence. The classic "no miracles" argument posits that the theoretical, unobservable entities invoked by mature sciences—such as quarks, electromagnetic fields, and spacetime curvature—must genuinely exist in reality. Furthermore, our scientific theories must be at least approximately true descriptions of these entities and their interactions. If these unobservable entities were mere instrumental fictions, the precise empirical predictions generated by relying on them would represent a statistical impossibility. Realists readily concede that the history of science is littered with discarded theories whose posited unobservable entities, such as phlogiston, caloric fluid, or the luminiferous aether, were later deemed entirely non-existent. Anti-realist critics frequently use this historical graveyard to fuel the pessimistic meta-induction argument, which suggests our current theories will likely meet the same fate. However, realists counter that while the specific ontological claims of those past theories were ultimately abandoned, their underlying structural architectures and mathematical frameworks are frequently retained. These mathematical structures are routinely subsumed into broader successor theories, demonstrating that science exhibits a cumulative, rational progression toward an ultimate truth about the unobservable universe, rather than a sequence of disjointed paradigms.

Passage B
Constructive empiricism offers a leaner, more epistemically cautious interpretation of the scientific endeavor, explicitly rejecting the realist’s demand for absolute ontological commitment. According to this view, the primary aim of science is not to uncover the hidden, literal truth about unobservable realms, but simply to construct theories that are empirically adequate. An empirically adequate theory is one that correctly captures, predicts, and saves observable phenomena. When a scientific theory successfully predicts complex outcomes, we need not take the perilous inductive leap of assuming its unobservable theoretical postulates correspond to physical reality. Instead, the predictive success of our current scientific theories is best understood through a Darwinian evolutionary analogy: we are left with highly successful theories today precisely because the empirically unfit ones were relentlessly tested and discarded by the scientific community over centuries. Thus, a theory's predictive success merely indicates its high degree of empirical fitness and observational reliability, not its absolute metaphysical truth. Furthermore, committing to the physical existence of every unobservable entity posited by a theory introduces unnecessary and burdensome metaphysical baggage that science does not require to function effectively. A working scientist can fully utilize the complex mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics to engineer sophisticated technologies, such as lasers and quantum computers, without ever needing to assert that a "probability wave function" is a real, physical entity existing in the universe, rather than merely a profoundly useful, abstract calculating device.

It can be inferred from the passages that both authors would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements concerning the "unobservable entities" mentioned in the texts?