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Ontic SR claims that unobservable entities do not exist, but we can still know the structure of the universe.

So what are the corresponding structural (scientific) theories actually about?

Can we make any claims about it other than the one that our scientific structures, refer to it?

  • It doesn't claim they do not exist but rather that their first order properties ( "essence") are unknowable, because only relations among them affect our experience. So only these relations ("structure") can be recovered from it – Conifold Mar 29 '16 at 17:40
  • @Conifold i thought that was *epistemic* SR? –  Mar 29 '16 at 17:42
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    "Ontic" structural realism is a recent fad, and has the advantage of more consistency, if we can not know individual essences how would we know that they are there at all. They treat individuals or essences only as placeholders for expressing structural relations, which can equivalently be expressed without them, as in category theory. Basically, it is a reaction to breakdown of classical ideas about ontology and metaphysical reasoning for relativistic and quantum phenomena. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/#OntStrReaOSR – Conifold Mar 29 '16 at 17:57
  • yeah! i should read some of the book length studies... at least some OSR claims that 1st order properties *don't exist*, not merely that we can't know they do. –  Mar 29 '16 at 18:02
  • Possible duplicate of [Structural Realism vs. Scientific Formalism?](http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/9940/structural-realism-vs-scientific-formalism) – Geremia Oct 01 '16 at 21:03

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