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lukstafi comments on Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules - Less Wrong
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Correct me where I might go "off the rails". I think that descriptivism+realism implies that the theory has a denotational semantics, where the terms are part of the theory and the objects are part of reality. This goes without problem in case of mechanics applied to billiard ball dynamic, or of crowd dynamic theory, etc. But one cannot give denotational semantics to the "Standard Model" theory, because there is no outside-theory means of individuation of its objects like the elementary particles.
Presumably the reason you think it's unproblematic in the billiard ball case is that we can see billiard balls, so we have independent non-theoretical access to them. But we can also "see" the particles in the Standard Model, or at least we can see their experimental signatures. Now it's true that our observations in this case are much more obviously theory-laden than they are in the billiard ball case, but I would argue that this is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. In neither case do we have some kind of direct access to the object itself, unmediated by any model of the world. It's just that in the billiard ball case the mediation isn't so blatant. So I don't think the distinction you're drawing here holds up.
Anyway, if this is what you mean by anti-realism -- no access to the object unmediated by a model -- then I guess I'm fine with that kind of anti-realism. It doesn't seem to compel me to say things like "The Higgs boson doesn't actually exist."
Now my comments feel silly to me, I withdraw criticism. But I'd like to elicit the semantics under which we say we have a description. We don't have a description of the Higgs boson but of the experimental results, right?
Let me take a different stab at it. Do you mean by "The Higgs boson actually exists" that you believe that in every theory at least as good as the standard model, we could naturally delineate a structure that corresponds to the Higgs boson?
Note that the condition was not to have "access to the object unmediated by a model", but to have an independent model, the model which is being described.