John Worrall (1989), Dialectica 43(1-2):99-124 — DOI-10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00933.x
Standing in the record
Registered on 2026-09-29 at the owner’s request, because the owner’s prior-art novelty map (a private working
document on concepts as projectors, the linear representation hypothesis and their neighbours) cites it: row 9: founding paper of (epistemic) structural realism under ‘reality = invariance’; §4 must-cite.
It is seeded from metadata and published descriptions and has not been read here.
Only the year of first publication is known; published: uses 1 January.
Identification notes: Not held: nucleation LIT-175 is a different Worrall paper (2007, evidence-based medicine). Nucleation LIT-045 (Ladyman’s SEP entry ‘Structural Realism’) explicitly says Worrall 1989, Ladyman 1998 and Ladyman & Ross 2007 are the primary sources still to file.
It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-297 is the close reading of 2026-09-29, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the short, clearly argued source that revived epistemic structural realism and supplies its canonical Fresnel→Maxwell case. It argues informally from one example, leaves “structure” and “structural approximation” undefined, and is epistemic, not ontic. For the ontic position, and for any invariance-based reading of “structure”, it must be read with Ladyman 1998 and after.