 Demopoulos and Friedman (1985) find an anticipation of the recent “structural realist” view of scientific theories in (Russell 1927), The Analysis of Matter. They argue that the logical constructions of sense data in Russell’s earlier thinking on the “problem of matter” were replaced by inferences to the structural properties of space and matter from patterns of sense data. We may sense patches of color next to each other in our visual field, but what that tells us about the causes of those sense data, about matter, is only revealed by the structure of those relationships. Thus the color of a patch in our visual field tells us nothing about the intrinsic properties of the table that causes that experience. Instead it is the structural properties of our experiences, such as their relative order in time, and which are between which others in the visual field, that gives us a clue as to the structural relationships of time and space within the material world that causes the experience. The contemporary version of this account, called “structural realism”, holds that it is only the structural properties and relations that a scientific theory attributes to the world about which we should be scientific realists. (See the entry on  structural realism.)