Thank you very much. I called twice this evening; my number ends in 7008. I’m available tonight until 24:00, and I’d be happy if you could call me back in your free time.

Thank you for the conversation. There’s one thing I forgot to ask, and I’m interested in where you would place it: there are examples of true theories that were unsuccessful at a certain point in time (the philosopher Laudan gives several examples; for instance, the theory of continental drift, which says that the continents used to be arranged differently in the past, failed to explain various findings at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet today we think the theory is correct, among other things because of how well it fits with the theory of tectonic plates). This supposedly strengthens the claim that the connection between success and truth can be severed.

One could answer here that there are very few such examples. To that, the anti-realists reply that this is not true, and that already becomes an empirical dispute.

Maybe you have another interesting answer, or insights from the history of science?

I didn’t understand what you saw in this example that is different from other cases.

Maybe it isn’t different from the other cases, but I’m not sure I see that.
The point is that the very fact that there are successful theories that later turned out to be false does not threaten realism, since they were closer to the truth than any other theory available in their time. But if we are talking about true theories that were unsuccessful, and setting them against false theories that were successful, then that already shows that at a given point in time the success of a certain theory was not an indication of its truth (because the successful theory is less close to the truth than the unsuccessful theory, as stated, at that same point in time). Only in hindsight can we say: look, the truer theory also ended up being more successful. But if we are talking about that same point in time, we could not have known that. And so one can project this onto the present and argue that perhaps theories that are currently less successful are actually closer to the truth than theories that are currently more successful, and that seemingly undermines the connection between success and truth.

I don’t see a difference. This is just another example in which we were mistaken. There are others like it. Only here it became clear to us that we were mistaken, and it turned out that the mistake led us back again (originally there was a double mistake).