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This chapter traces the development of structural realism within the scientific realism debate and the wider current of structuralism that has swept the philosophy of the natural sciences in the twentieth century. 1 The primary aim is to make perspicuous the many manifestations of structural realism and their underlying claims. Among other things, I will compare structural realism’s various manifestations in order to throw more light onto the relations between them. At the end of the chapter, I will identify the main objections raised against the epistemic form of structural realism. This last task will pave the way for the evaluation of the structural realist answer to the main epistemological question, an evaluation that will be central to the rest of this dissertation.

Generally construed, structuralism is a point of view that emphasises the importance of relations. It takes the structure, ie the nexus of relations, of a given domain of interest to be the foremost goal of research and holds that an understanding of the subject matter has to be, and most successfully is, achieved in structural terms. The following quote from Redhead (2001a) nicely conveys this intuition:“Informally a structure is a system of related elements, and structuralism is a point of view which focuses attention on the relations between the elements as distinct from the elements themselves”(74). This vision has shaped research programmes in fields as diverse as mathematics, linguistics, literary criticism, aesthetics, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy of science. It is the last-mentioned that I am concerned with in this chapter.