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JonathanLivengood comments on What do professional philosophers believe, and why? - Less Wrong
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I'd say the Anti-Naturalism and Anti-Realism clusters are obviously wrong. Trekophobia and Logical Conventionalism are less obvious, though they clearly go against a lot of the basic views and tendencies on LW. Objectivism and Rationalism are more debatable, and Externalism seems the most LWy on a cursory look. But even Externalism only gets a couple of things consistently right, at best. (And in a fairly arbitrary manner.)
Perhaps I under-emphasized a really crucial point: All of these clusters should be criticized not just for the views you see, but for the ones you don't see. Why don't Externalists knock physicalism out of the ballpark? Why aren't Rationalists winning at Newcomb's Problem 80, 90, 100% of the time? Defensibility is an indefensibly low standard; expecting mediocrity is expecting too little even of high school philospohy students, to say nothing of those who have devoted 30, 40, 50 years to grasping these topics, with all the resources of human civilization at their disposal.
Too slow.
I'm guessing that you don't really know what anti-realism in philosophy of science looks like. I suspect that most of the non-specialist philosophers who responded also don't really know what the issues are, so this is hardly a knock against you. Scientific realism sounds like it should be right. But the issue is more complicated, I think.
Scientific realists commit to at least the following two theses:
(1) Semantic Realism. Read scientific theories literally. If one theory says that space-time is curved and there are no forces, while the other says that space-time is flat and there are primitive forces (so the two have exactly the same observational consequences in all cases), then the realist says that at most one of the two is true.
(2) Epistemic Realism. In every case, observation and experimentation can provide us with good epistemic (as opposed to pragmatic) reasons to believe that what some single theory, read literally, says about the world.
Denying either of these leads to some form of anti-realism, broadly construed. Positivists, instrumentalists, and pragmatists deny (1), as Einstein seems to have done in at least two cases. Constructive empiricists deny (2) in order to keep a commitment to (1) while avoiding inflationary metaphysics. Structural realists deny one or both of these commitments, meaning that they are anti-realists in the sense of the question at stake.
Jonathan, Anti-Realism here isn't restricted to the view in philosophy of science. It's also associated with a rejection of the correspondence and deflationary theories of truth and of external-world realism. I'm currently somewhere in between a scientific realist and a structural realist, and I'm fine with classifying the latter as an anti-realism, though not necessarily in the sense of Anti-Realism Chalmers coined above to label one of the factors.
Your characterization of scientific realism, though, is way too strong. "In every case" should read "In most cases" or "In many cases", for Epistemic Realism. That's already a difficult enough view to defend, without loading it with untenable absolutism.
My main concern with Anti-Realists isn't that they're often skeptical about whether bosons exist; it's that they're often skeptical about whether tables exist, and/or about whether they're mind-independent, and/or about whether our statements about them are true in virtue of how the world outside ourselves is.
Ah, I see that I misread. Somehow I had it in my head that you were talking about the question on the philpapers survey specifically about scientific realism. Probably because I've been teaching the realism debate in my philosophy of science course the last couple of weeks.
I am, however, going to disagree that I've given a too strong characterization of scientific realism. I did (stupidly and accidentally) drop the phrase "... is true or approximately true" from the end of the second commitment, but with that in place, the scientific realist really is committed to our being able to uniquely determine by evidence which of several literal rivals we ought to believe to be true or approximately true. Weakening to "most cases" or "many cases" deflates scientific realism significantly. Even constructive empiricists are going to believe that many scientific theories are literally true, since many scientific theories do not say anything about unobservable entities.
Also, without the "in every case," it is really hard to make sense of the concern realists have about under-determination. If realists thought that sometimes they wouldn't have good reasons to believe some one theory to be true or approximately true, then they could reply to real-life under-determination arguments (as opposed to the toy examples sometimes offered) by saying, "Oh, this is an exceptional case."
Anyway, the kinds of anti-realist who oppose scientific realism almost never deny that tables exist. (Though maybe they should for reasons coming out of material object metaphysics.)