antirealism

Antirealism is a family of philosophical positions that deny or revise the assumption that the aim of inquiry is to describe a mind-independent reality or to assert truth-conditions about such a reality. The term is used across domains, most prominently in the philosophy of science, but also in ethics, mathematics, and semantics, where it denotes skepticism about objective status of certain claims about the world.

In the philosophy of science, antirealism challenges the view that successful theories literally describe unobservable aspects of the world. Instrumentalism treats scientific theories as tools for predicting phenomena, with no necessary commitment to the literal existence of unobservables. Constructive empiricism, associated with Bas van Fraassen, holds that science aims to produce empirically adequate theories, and belief in unobservable entities is optional. Pessimistic induction argues that since past successful theories were eventually shown false about unobservables, current theories may be false as well.

In ethics, moral antirealism denies the existence of objective moral facts or properties. Moral statements are moods, prescriptions, or relative to frameworks rather than true or false in a mind-independent sense. In semantics, anti-realism questions whether truth conditions require correspondence with a reality independent of language or thought, favoring deflationary, use-based, or constructivist accounts of truth and meaning. In mathematics, anti-realist positions include intuitionism and fictionalism, which reject a platonic realm of abstract objects.

Historically, antirealism arose as a major challenge to scientific and metaphysical realism in the 20th century, with debates involving figures such as van Fraassen, Quine, and Putnam. The label encompasses diverse views, united by skepticism toward robust, mind-independent realist commitments in their respective domains.