From data to phenomena

Abstract This chapter takes the first step in clarifying the ontology of nature that perspectival realism licenses. It begins by identifying main insights from three philosophical traditions: the empirical roots of scientific knowledge; its modal nature; and its pertaining to us as epistemic agents. A perspectival realist is committed to all three. It then goes back to Bogen and Woodward’s distinction between data and phenomena, and presents the ‘evidential inference problem’: under what distinctively epistemic grounds do data provide evidence that a particular phenomenon is real? It shows how by understanding phenomena along new lines here proposed, the evidential inference problem gets dissolved. It argues that a satisfactory answer to the evidential inference problem is not within easy reach of either stringent empiricism or metaphysically rich dispositional versions of realism. And it explains the perspectival realist answer to the evidential inference problem. Such an answer is articulated first via a brief survey of recent trends in philosophy of science and philosophy of physics that go in a kindred direction to the one that is advocated here. The chapter proposes a phenomena-first approach to ontology that is spelled out in terms of stable events, modally robust phenomena, and perspectival data-to-phenomena inferences.