“Non nel cielo sono date le stelle”, ma la loro esistenza sì: una risposta al realismo di Quentin Meillassoux

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism is metaphysically excessive for the purposes of the philosophy of science. In its place, I develop a moderate structural realism that integrates neoKantian semantic constructivism with Moritz Schlick’s neoempiricist realism. First, drawing on Ernst Cassirer, I contend that observation is irreducibly theoryladen; so construed, the absolute contingency of nature can be accommodated within scientific practice without recourse to speculative metaphysics. Second, I deflate Cassirer’s idealist holism by leveraging Schlick’s principle of verification and his notion of “coordination” (Zuordnung), which together forge the relationship between theoretical concepts and observational procedures. Read alongside recent work in epistemology, this framework preserves a contextrelative analytic/synthetic distinction and sustains an empirically robust realism. The upshot is a constructivist–realist compromise: scientific theories represent internal routes to experience and to the external world, and the history of science is the history of the coevolution of theory and experience.