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TimS comments on How to deal with non-realism? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yikes. "X" anti-realism is the position that there are no objective (mind-independent) facts about X. So moral anti-realism, for instance, does not deny that there are universally shared values in humans, it simply denies that those values are anything more then attitudes. When an anti-realist hears "murder is wrong" she either thinks "That's not a proposition and therefore, neither true nor false." (non-cognitivism), "That's true because we both hold a very low opinion of murder" (subjectivism) or "That's false because it implies the existence of objective moral laws which don't exist" (error theory).
"Physical" anti-realism isn't really a term but presumably you mean metaphysical anti-realism or scientific anti-realism. Scientific anti-realism denies the mind-independent existence of scientific theories. For instance an anti-realist might claim that scientific facts are determined by the prevailing Kuhnian paradigm or are socially constructed and therefore, in some way contingent on the minds of the scientists who created them. Metaphysical anti-realism denies that objects and properties in the world exist independently of our conception of them. Thus, realism is consistent with both skepticism and belief in our senses. Realism is a position regarding the question "what exists?" not "what can we know?". Plenty of anti-realists believe that the physical world can be predicted and that scientific explanations "work". What they would doubt is whether they correspond exactly to anything external to our minds.
You are right that my pithy summary was misleading. This may be a terminological point, but I am confused about how a hard-core scientific anti-realist can believe in predictions. At the very least, someone who thinks there is no objective physical reality has a hard time explaining why science seems like a one-way ratchet, with predictions always getting better and never getting worse.
I agree that science, like all facts, are socially-mediated. I think the case for incommensurability between certain scientific theories is overwhelming. But it seems like there must be some regularity external to human minds for scientific predictions to work the way we've observed them to work. (I vaguely recall my Philosophy of Science professor saying something like "Preserve the phenomena")
In short, the problem of Induction says that we can't prove the sun will rise tomorrow in the sense that we can prove that 3 + 5 = 8. But hardcore scientific anti-realism proponents seem like they should be surprised when the sun rises tomorrow (more precisely, when they experience what appears to be the sun rising tomorrow) because they literally believe that there is no mechanism that suggests it will happen. (Or am I just setting up a strawman?)