Evidence Explanation and Realism

The essays in this volume address three fundamental questions in the philosophy of science: What is required for some fact to be evidence for a scientific hypothesis? What does it mean to say that a scientist or a theory explains a phenomenon? Should scientific theories that postulate unobservable entities such as electrons be construed realistically as aiming to correctly describe a world underlying what is directly observable or should such theories be understood as aiming to correctly describe only the observable world?