A Dialogue among Recent Views of Entity Realism

Abstract

This paper concerns the recent revival of entity realism. Having been started with the work of Ian Hacking, Nancy Cartwright and Ronald Giere, the project of entity realism has recently been developed by Matthias Egg, Markus Eronen, and Bence Nanay. The paper opens a dialogue among these recent views on entity realism and integrates them into a more advanced view. The result is an epistemological criterion for reality: the property-tokens of a certain type may be taken as real insofar as only they can be materially inferred from the evidence obtained in a variety of independent ways of detection.

A Pragmatist Interpretation and Defense of Entity Realism

“…It is motivated in part by Cartwright's arguments in The Dappled World (1999), but mainly reflects Hacking's views. Neither Suárez nor others such as Egg (2014), Eronen (2015), Nanay (2013, 2019), and Khalili (2023 appear to find MER to be the most defensible version of ER, however. Suárez focuses his argument on defending epistemic experimental realism (EER), which is the view that "Manipulation is a necessary and sufficient condition on causal warrant: Our belief that x exists acquires this special kind of warrant if and only if we believe that we manipulate x" (2008: 141; emphasis mine).…”

Self‐Powered Stretchable Sensor Arrays Exhibiting Magnetoelasticity for Real‐Time Human–Machine Interaction

“…The phenomenon of electromagnetic induction was discovered by Faraday [ 39 ] in 1831 and is the primary means of electricity generation today. While electromagnetic generators (EMGs) have been employed to produce power, they have rarely been exploited in flexible and wearable devices.…”