Critical Contextual Empiricism as a Version of Pluralist Realism
Critical Contextual Empiricism as a Version of Pluralist Realism

Summary/Abstract: Critical contextual empiricism (CCE ), developed by Helen Longino, has made it possible to permanently establish the social and normative aspects in the treatment of understanding of science. In addition, there is a belief that the approach makes it possible to make sense of some classical problems of the philosophy of science, especially the problem of underdetermination, in a better way than any kind of realist or antirealist approaches have been able to. However, quite recently, Rein Vihalemm proposed a realist approach, ‘practical realism’ (PR), which also assignes the cultural and normative aspects an influential role in making sense of science. The current paper includes a comparative analysis of CCE and PR and reaches the conclusion that the former can actually be taken as a version of pluralist realism, despite being traditionally critical of that kind of approaches. As a result of combining CCE with PR, a new version of realism is possible on the basis of these, one that could be called ‘pluralist social realism’.

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