Does believing a theory entail believing the entities it involves exist?
In physics lessons, secondary school children are taught about electrons. They are shown pictures of the structure of electrons, told about their involvement in charging atoms, and how when they flow they can be used to power electrical appliances. Nobody, however, has ever seen an electron, and in fact, due to their size being in the same order as that of protons, we will never see an electron, at least not the way we see things currently, even with the most advanced microscope or if our eyes evolved to millions of times the precision they currently have. So is it irresponsible to teach children in school about these unseen, unseeable, entities, as if they really exist? Realism is the doctrine which states that statements make claims about how the world ‘out there’ actually is; it holds that there is a mind-independent reality, and that to say something true is to make a statement which corresponds to the way things actually are. Scientific realists, therefore, hold that talk about th
