Article Do electrons exist? (Cat Gillen on structural realism)

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https://iai.tv/articles/hossenfelder-vs-..._auid=2020

INTRO: Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and philosopher Philip Goff recently argued over whether electrons exist. At the core of the argument was whether scientific theories are true, or whether they are something like useful fictions, as well as the meta-question of whether this argument is worth having in the first place. Philosopher of science Cat Gillen offers a way out and through.

EXCERPTS: . . . To answer these questions, we must delve into the intriguing scientific realism debate.

[...] A middle ground can be found in adopting a more nuanced form of realism that is able to explain the success of scientific theories with at least some element of truth, whilst simultaneously allowing some parts of the theory to be false. This selective realism separates the working parts of theory (those parts which are actually responsible for deriving the correct predictions) from the idle parts (superfluous content which has no play on any predictions). These working parts should be expected to carry through upon theory change and it is these working parts alone which the realist can then ascribe truth to.

Similarly, structural realism is a flavour of realism that identifies the working parts of a theory to be its structure, often taken as its mathematical content... (MORE - missing details)
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VIDEO INTRO: Recently Philip and Sabine Hossenfelder had a discussion on Twitter about the relationship between science and the entities referred to in scientific theories. We're going to interview philosopher of science doctoral candidate Cat Gillen (Durham University) on the debates between realists and instrumentalists in the philosophy of science.

Do Electrons Exist? (Philip Goff, Keith Frankish, Cat Gillen) .... https://youtu.be/LVX7IMW2npw

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/LVX7IMW2npw

[Magical Realist]

I consider myself agnostic when it comes to electrons existing. The whole existence of them was called into question one day when I was attending Navy electronics school in Great Lakes Ill back in 1990. The instructor, after having detailed the flow of electrons in circuits resulting in voltage, resistance, and current, introduced us to the equally valid model of Hole theory. Instead of electrons, there was a flow of negative "holes" in the circuit resulting in the same properties as electron flow does, only flowing in the opposite direction (from the ground up). Alas my faith in the almighty electron was dashed. Indeed, every picoscopic particle is called into question by its inseparable correlation to a shadow twin self. To this day I embrace the model of the Taoist/Jungian syzygy--of the unity of all opposites creating all the phenomena of energy and matter in the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_hole...he%20state.