Abstract
Two powerful arguments have famously dominated the realism debate in philosophy of science: The No Miracles Argument (NMA) and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction (PMI). A standard response to the PMI is selective scientific realism (SSR), wherein only the working posits of a theory are considered worthy of doxastic commitment. Building on the recent debate over the NMA and the connections between the NMA and the PMI, I here consider a stronger inductive argument that poses a direct challenge for SSR: Because it is sometimes exactly the working posits which contradict each other, i.e., that which is directly responsible for empirical success, SSR cannot deliver a general explanation of scientific success.
Highlights
Two powerful arguments have famously dominated the realism debate in philosophy of science: The No Miracles Argument (NMA) and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction (PMI).1 The intuition underpinning the NMA has been colorfully stated by Worrall (2011, p. 11) as follows: 46 Page 2 of 31European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2021) 11: 46‘How on earth’, it seems unavoidable to ask, ‘could a theory score a dramatic predictive success [...] unless its claims about the reality ‘underlying’ the phenomena [...] are at least approximately in tune with the real underlying structure of the universe?’In Putnam’s (1975a, p. 73) more straightforward words, scientific realism (SR) is “the only philosophy that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle.” But surely there are no miracles
Building on the recent debate over the NMA and the connections between the NMA and the PMI, I here consider a stronger inductive argument that poses a direct challenge for selective scientific realism (SSR): Because it is sometimes exactly the working posits which contradict each other, i.e., that which is directly responsible for empirical success, SSR cannot deliver a general explanation of scientific success
I have extended the recent debate over the NMA into a stronger PMI that provides a direct challenge for SSR
Summary
Two powerful arguments have famously dominated the realism debate in philosophy of science: The No Miracles Argument (NMA) and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction (PMI).1 The intuition underpinning the NMA has been colorfully stated by Worrall (2011, p. 11) as follows: 1Following Magnus (2010), I take Stanford’s (2006) ‘new induction’ to be a separate, maybe deeper, issue, and will hence not comment on it any further below.
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