Structural realism is the view that scientific theories give us knowledge only of the structure of the unobservable world. The view faces an influential objection that was first posed by Max Newman: if our knowledge of the unobservable world were strictly limited to its structure, our knowledge turns out to be trivial, for it amounts to nothing more than knowledge of the cardinality of the world. In this paper, I shall propose a response to Newman’s objection. It shall be argued that in having epistemic access to the intrinsic nature of our conscious experiences—knowledge that structural realists allow for—we have knowledge of what it is to exist as concrete phenomena. With the plausible assumption that the relations of the unobservable world are also similarly concrete, one can address Newman’s objection. I shall further contrast this response to other similar responses that have been proposed, and also address the objection that this response is not available to structural realists.

中文翻译：

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我们所知道的不仅仅是结构？

结构现实主义是这样一种观点，即科学理论仅使我们了解了不可观察世界的结构。这种观点面临着麦克斯·纽曼最初提出的有影响力的反对意见：如果我们对不可观察世界的认识严格地局限于其结构，那么我们的知识就变得微不足道了，因为它无非是对世界基数的了解。在本文中，我将对纽曼的反对提出建议。应当指出，在认识到我们有意识的经验的内在本质时，即结构现实主义者所允许的知识，我们才知道作为具体现象而存在的东西。假设无法观察的世界的关系也同样是具体的，就可以解决纽曼的反对。