"This reality crisis has grown so dire that Stephen Hawking has called for a kind of philosophical surrender, a white flag he terms "model-dependent realism", which basically says that while our theoretical models offer possible descriptions of the world, we'll simply never know the true reality that lies beneath. Perhaps there is no reality at all. But structural realism offers a way out. An explanation. A reality. The only catch is that it's not made of physical objects. Then again, our theories never said it was. Electrons aren't real, but the mathematical structure of quantum field theory is. Gauge forces aren't real, but the symmetry groups that describe them are. The dimensions, geometries and even strings described by any given string theory aren't real—what's real are the mathematical maps that transform one string theory into another."
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Amanda Gefter, "Structural Realism" (2012)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Structuralism_(philosophy_of_science)
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Structuralism (philosophy of science)
Structuralism (also known as scientific structuralism or as the structuralistic theory-concept) is an active research program in the philosophy of science, which was first developed in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s by several analytic philosophers.
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