[3] Structuralism 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.
The proponents of this meta-theoretic theory are Frederick Suppe, Patrick Suppes, Ronald Giere,[5][3] Joseph D. Sneed, Wolfgang Stegmüller, Carlos Ulises Moulines [es], Wolfgang Balzer, John Worrall, Elie Georges Zahar, Pablo Lorenzano, Otávio Bueno, Anjan Chakravartty, Tian Yu Cao, Steven French, and Michael Redhead.
[3] ESR, a position originally and independently held by Henri Poincaré (1902),[8][9] Bertrand Russell (1927),[10] and Rudolf Carnap (1928),[11] was resurrected by John Worrall (1989), who proposes that there is retention of structure across theory change.
[14][3][15] Newman argued that the ESR claim that one can know only the abstract structure of the external world trivializes scientific knowledge.
John Worrall and Elie Georges Zahar (2001) claim that Newman's objection applies only if a distinction between observational and theoretical terms is not made.
[27] Psillos also defends David Lewis's descriptive-causal theory of reference[28][3] (according to which the abandoned theoretical terms after a theory change are regarded as successfully referring "after all")[3][28] and claims that it can adequately deal with referential continuity in conceptual transitions, during which theoretical terms are abandoned,[29] thus rendering ESR redundant.
OSR is strongly motivated by modern physics, particularly quantum field theory, which undermines intuitive notions of identifiable objects with intrinsic properties.
[3] Some early quantum physicists held this view, including Hermann Weyl (1931),[33] Ernst Cassirer (1936),[34] and Arthur Eddington (1939).
[40] In quantum field theory (QFT), traditional proposals for "the most basic known structures" divide into "particle interpretations" such as ascribing reality to the Fock space of particles, and "field interpretations" such as considering the quantum wavefunction to be identical to the underlying reality.
Another example, which does not require the complications of curved spacetime, is that in ferromagnetism, symmetry-breaking analysis results in inequivalent Hilbert spaces.