Concept
Model-dependent realism
Overview
Model-dependent realism is a view of scientific inquiry that focuses on the role of scientific models of phenomena. It claims reality should be interpreted based upon these models, and where several models overlap in describing a particular subject, multiple, equally valid, realities exist. It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the "true reality" of a model as we can never be absolutely certain of anything. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model. The term "model-dependent realism" was coined by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book The Grand Design.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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So far then, the perceived world in space and time, which makes itself known as causation alone, is entirely real, and is throughout simply what it appears to be, and it appears wholly and without reserve as idea, bound together according to the law of causality. This is its empirical reality. On the other hand, all causality is in the understanding alone, and for the understanding.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
Close in meaning to Model-dependent realism; the term itself is not named.
If realism is generous enough to have a place _within_ its world (as a _res_ having social and temporal qualities as well as spatial ones) for data in process of construction of _new_ objects, the outlook is radically different from the case where, in the interests of a theory, a realism insists that analytic determinations are the sole real things.[5] If it be not only conceded but asserted that the subject-matter…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
Close in meaning to Model-dependent realism; the term itself is not named.
(1) The systems which defend the Idealism of final causes in nature grant, it is true, on the one hand to their principle a causality in accordance with the laws of motion (through which [causality] natural things exist purposively); but they deny to it _intentionality_, _i.e._ that it designedly determines itself to this its purposive production; in other words, they deny that the cause is a purpose. This is…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Model-dependent realism is.