This book gives a systematic formulation of critical scientific realism by surveying varieties of realism in ontology, semantics, epistemology, theory construction, and methodology. According to the standard version of scientific realism, scientific theories are attempts to give true descriptions of mind‐independent and possibly unobservable reality, where truth means correspondence between language and reality. Critical realism adds to this view four important qualifications: our access to the world is always relative to a chosen linguistic framework (conceptual pluralism); all human knowledge about reality is uncertain and corrigible (fallibilism); even the best theories in science may fail to be true, but nevertheless, successful theories typically are close to the truth (truthlikeness); a part, but only a part, of reality consists of human‐made constructions (Popper's world 3). Niiniluoto combines Tarski's semantic definition of truth with his own explication of Popper's notion of verisimilitude, and characterizes scientific progress in terms of increasing truthlikeness. He argues in detail that critical scientific realism can be successfully defended against its most important current alternatives: instrumentalism, constructive empiricism, Kantianism, pragmatism, internal realism, relativism, social constructivism, and epistemological anarchism.

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Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called “hypothesis” or “abduction.” He characterized abduction as reasoning “from effect to cause,” and as “the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis.” Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of analysis), have been seen as providing a logic of scientific discovery. Alternatively, abduction is interpreted as giving reasons for pursuing a hypothesis. Inference to the best explanation (IBE) has also been regarded as an important mode of justification, both in everyday life, detective stories, and science. In particular, scientific realism has been defended by an abductive nomiracle argument (Smart, Putnam, Boyd), while the critics of realism have attempted to show that this appeal to abduction is question-begging, circular, or incoherent (Fine, Laudan, van Fraassen). This paper approaches these issues by distinguishing weaker and stronger forms of abduction, and by showing how these types of inferences can be given Peircean and Bayesian probabilistic reconstructions.

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