Hi, I'm Michela Massimi and I'm a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy Science in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Today I find myself at the National Museum of Scotland to introduce you to one of the most lively debates in contemporary philosophy of science. The debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. This debate is unlike many others that popular philosophy or science. It is not a debate about a specific topic or theme or theory in physics, biology or cognitive science. But it is a much broader debate about what science is all about and what we should expect from good science. In other words this is a debate about the aims of science. With all the intuitions about what the aims of science are, there seems to be two possible views. On one view science aims to be accurate to provide us with a good description and analysis of the available experimental evidence even in the field of inquiry that is. In other words, we make spec signs to save the phenomenon. On a different view, we make spec signs, not just to save the phenomenon, but to provide us with the true story about this phenomenon. How they go about what sort of a mechanism when involved in their production. And often telling a true story involves appear to unobservable entities. Entities that prove elusive to the human eye like neutrinos, protons, DNA strands and so forth. So what do you think? Science saving the phenomena or the science giving a true story about this phenomena? Well, depending on how you answer the question, you will be siding either with scientific anti-realism or scientific realism. In the rest of this lecture, I will introduce you to these two main views very briefly and to some of the main arguments and counter-arguments. Asking what the aims of science are may sound armchair philosophy, but it's not. This is essential question that has shaped the course of western science and has fueled some of the most important debate in our cultural history. Our story begins several centuries before Galileo and Newton.