Scientific Structuralism and Newman’s Objection

Since the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers of science—both realist and anti-realist—have shown a special tendency toward the concept of ‘structure’, mainly to address certain problems in the process of understanding science (particularly some serious problems arising from successive and deep changes in scientific theories over time). In this regard, different forms of ‘structuralism’ have been developed thus far around the belief that science is only capable of revealing the structure of the world (and not the ontological characteristics of its objects). However, all structuralisms have been subjected to a very serious criticism known as ‘Newman's objection’, which states that if structure is supposed to be the most we know about the world, then the only thing we will actually know about the world is cardinality, i.e., the number of related objects.Given the importance of structuralism in the philosophy of science as well as the seriousness of Newman's objection, the goal of this paper is to introduce both realist and anti-realist scientific structuralism and examine and evaluate how successfully they respond to this criticism. The findings of this examination suggest that both of these structuralisms are incapable or at least substantially problematic in answering Newman's objection, mostly due to their structuralist nature and underlying ideas.