Realists Waiting for Godot? The Verisimilitudinarian and the Cumulative Approach to Scientific Progress

Abstract

After a brief presentation of the Verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress, I argue that the notion of estimated verisimilitude is too weak for the purposes of scientific realism. Despite the realist-correspondist intuition that inspires the model—the idea that our theories get closer and closer to ‘the real way the world is’—, Bayesian estimations of truthlikeness (even when combined with the ‘No Miracles Argument’) are not objective enough to sustain a realist position. The main argument of the paper is that, since estimated verisimilitude is not connected to actual verisimilitude, the way the Verisimilitudinarian account works is not in the end different from other antirealist accounts. Finally, I briefly present Alexander Bird’s cumulative approach to scientific progress, and argue that it has a similar problem; Bird has in mind truth in the correspondence sense, but all the metaphysical weight is put on the notion of ‘approximate truth’—whose connection to ‘the real way the world is’ is not clear.