Scientific realism and the problem of inconsistency: A look at the views of Brown and Cartwright

To be a realist about scientific theories is to believe that they are true in some real sense, i.e. to believe that what they say about the world corresponds with the facts in the world. A persistent challenge to scientific realism is the problem of inconsistency. Many of our scientific theories are inconsistent in one way or another, but in a classical system of logic, ex falso quodlibet states that you can derive anything using an inconsistent premise set. Thus, if a realist wants to remain committed to the truth of scientific theories, the result would be that their commitment set would, in effect, explode. The purpose of this thesis is to examine two different, and controversial, versions of scientific realism that may be able to avoid the problem, namely Bryson Brown's account of approximate truth in context and Nancy Cartwright's dappled world.