Back when I was in my second or third year of university, I took a class on the philosophy of science. It was that class that eased a lot fo the skepticism I had - and maybe some anxiety as well - around what it means to know something. After all, I’d been asking annoying questions since I first learned how to speak. Why, why, why? I think at the time I had a specific desire to know about things fundamentally: like a math proof, I wanted to know without recourse or question that something was. Of course, this was an endeavor of ego: even math proofs start from arbitrary fundamentals that seem true, and there’s real life examples of where even mathematicians disagree on things (re: constructivism vs non-constructivism).
The class inspired me in a lot of ways, but one of the last topics that we talked about was the concept of scientific realism, and, conversely, scientific anti-realism. At the time, I didn’t really understand it. For the people who have scraped out this part of the internet for god knows what reason - maybe I’ve decided that you might be interested in my strange antics and gave you the link - the scientific realism debate is the debate within the philosophy of science of whether science tries to establish true things, or whether it tries to establish useful things. This seems like a very non-point: by knowing true things, wouldn’t it follow that that knowledge is useful? But the slight difference marks an important crux, considering that it informs the mindset and framework around how we go into scientific experiments. It informs what kind of scientific experiments we decide are worthwhile, and the criteria we are looking for. Are we trying to be right, or are we trying to do something?
As you can guess, I used to be very firmly in the realism camp. When I try to go back into my mindset at the time, I can pick up vague pieces of why that may be. Math works in a binary, logic can explain everything, etc: generally things that my ego decided was important to my identity. But I also don’t want to totally discredit that earlier version of me. Realism is appealing to those who study their asses off in their field. I wouldn’t even describe it as appealing: it almost seems necessary to believe that the experiments you are doing and all of the work you are putting in is towards a true thing. Its like if you were married, and found out 15 years in that your spouse has been cheating on you the whole time. Everything you had done up to that point feels like it had been a lie. It would rock your world. I am sympathetic to this.