The no-miracles argument (NMA) holds that the approximate truth of successful scientific theories is the best explanation of their predictive-instrumental success, and it is itself an inference to the best explanation (IBE). Stathis Psillos supplemented the NMA with epistemological reliabilism to answer the charge that this makes the argument viciously circular; Valeriano Iranzo showed that this defence faces a dilemma — an unqualified reliabilism begs the question against the antirealist, while a reliabilism qualified to instrumental (observational) reliability no longer yields the realist conclusion about unobservables. The open problem is whether any reliabilist account can escape this dilemma: either a formulation that legitimately extends instrumental reliability to full reliability about unobservables without presupposing realist commitments (together with an account of explanatory goodness that makes the abductive step from instrumental to full reliability non-circular), or a rigorous demonstration that no such account is possible. The core of the problem has remained unresolved in the subsequent literature (Busch, Newman, Psillos's restatement, Mizrahi, Gubelmann, Carter–Pritchard, Rowbottom).

Background

Scientific realism is the view that successful scientific theories are approximately true, including with respect to unobservable entities and mechanisms (electrons, fields, genes) that figure in their explanations. Its most influential supporting argument is the no-miracles argument (NMA): the predictive and instrumental success of science would be a miracle if theories were not approximately true, so truth is the best explanation of success. The NMA is an instance of inference to the best explanation (IBE), the mode of inference that licenses accepting the hypothesis that would, if correct, best explain the available evidence. Arthur Fine and other critics objected that the NMA is thereby viciously circular: it uses IBE to argue for the trustworthiness of IBE-delivered theories. Philosophers distinguish premise-circularity (an argument's conclusion already figures among its premises) from rule-circularity (the conclusion is obtained by a rule whose own trustworthiness the argument is meant to establish); only the first is uncontroversially vicious. In Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (1999), Stathis Psillos answered Fine by supplementing the NMA with epistemological reliabilism — the view, associated with Alvin Goldman, that a belief-forming rule or method is justified when it tends to produce true rather than false beliefs. On the two-stage reconstruction Psillos later made explicit: the best explanation of the instrumental reliability of theory-laden scientific methodology (its success in getting predictions right) is that the background theories it employs are approximately true; and since those theories were typically arrived at by IBE, IBE is a reliable, truth-conducive method. Here a theory is empirically adequate when all of its observational consequences are true; empirical adequacy concerns only the observable domain, while the realist conclusion concerns unobservables as well. In a 2008 critical note, Valeriano Iranzo argued that Psillos's reliabilist rescue fails. If reliabilism is unqualified — taking the reliability of IBE to range over both observable and unobservable domains — then invoking it simply presupposes exactly what the antirealist disputes, flagrantly begging the question. But an antirealist can coherently reformulate the reliabilist premise in instrumental terms (a rule is instrumentally reliable when it yields a high rate of empirically adequate conclusions, symbolized in the debate as the starred premises and conclusions such as C2∗C_{2}^{*}, the instrumental reliability of IBE, versus C2C_{2}, its full reliability). Combined with the NMA's premises, that starred version yields only the approximate empirical adequacy of background theories, not their approximate truth about unobservables. Iranzo also pressed the realist rejoinder that full reliability C2C_{2} is the best explanation of instrumental reliability C2∗C_{2}^{*}, judging that this explanatory step is weak — the entailment relation is a poor substitute for genuine explanatory goodness, a notion on which, as his notes concede, there is no consensus among advocates of IBE. Whether the reliabilist defence of the NMA can be made to work at all remains open.

Problem Statement

Determine whether epistemological reliabilism can non-question-beggingly underwrite the abductive (no-miracles) argument for scientific realism, in the precise sense left open by Iranzo's (2008) critique of Psillos's defence. Either (i) formulate a reliabilist supplementation of the NMA that escapes both horns of the dilemma: its reliability premise does not presuppose, against the antirealist, that inference to the best explanation is reliable in the unobservable domain (Iranzo's own term for the admissible qualified premise is "non-realist"), yet the realist conclusion follows — legitimately extending instrumental reliability, a method's tendency to yield empirically adequate conclusions (true in all observational consequences; C2∗C_{2}^{*}), to full reliability about unobservables (C2C_{2}) — and answer Iranzo's published objection to the realist rejoinder that full reliability C2C_{2} is the best explanation of instrumental reliability C2∗C_{2}^{*}, including his endnote-6 point that there is no consensus on "explanatory goodness" among the advocates of IBE; or (ii) rigorously establish the dilemma in the general form in which Iranzo states it: a reliabilist supplementation of the NMA either leaves the domain of IBE's reliability unqualified, and thereby begs the question against the antirealist, or is qualified in a non-realist way (e.g., restricted to instrumental reliability), and thereby does not entitle one to infer the realist conclusion about unobservables.

References

  1. Valeriano Iranzo (2008), "Reliabilism and the Abductive Defence of Scientific Realism", Journal for General Philosophy of Science 39(1):115–120. DOI: 10.1007/s10838-008-9060-2, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-008-9060-2
  2. Stathis Psillos (1999/2005), Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth, Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780203979648, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203979648
  3. Arthur Fine (1986), "Unnatural Attitudes: Realist and Instrumentalist Attachments to Science", Mind 95(378):149–179. DOI: 10.1093/mind/XCV.378.149, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCV.378.149
  4. Alvin I. Goldman (1979), "What is Justified Belief?", in G. S. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 1–23. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9493-5_1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9493-5_1
  5. Jacob Busch (2008), "No New Miracles, Same Old Tricks", Theoria 74(2):102–114. DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-2567.2008.00011.x, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-2567.2008.00011.x
  6. Mark Newman (2010), "The No-Miracles Argument, reliabilism, and a methodological version of the generality problem", Synthese 177(1):111–138. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9642-5, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9642-5
  7. Stathis Psillos (2011), "The Scope and Limits of the No Miracles Argument", in D. Dieks, W. J. Gonzalez, S. Hartmann, T. Uebel, M. Weber (eds.), Explanation, Prediction, and Confirmation, The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective vol. 2, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 23–35. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1180-8_2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1180-8_2
  8. Moti Mizrahi (2012), "Why the ultimate argument for scientific realism ultimately fails", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43(1):132–138. DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2011.11.001, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2011.11.001
  9. Reto Gubelmann (2019), "Scientifically Defending Realism I: Psillos' Holistic Approach", in A Science-Based Critique of Epistemological Naturalism in Quine's Tradition, Cham: Springer, pp. 205–235. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-24524-5_8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24524-5_8
  10. J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard (2018), "Inference to the Best Explanation and Epistemic Circularity", in K. McCain and T. Poston (eds.), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198746904.003.0009, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198746904.003.0009
  11. Jesper Kallestrup (2015), "Two Notions of Circularity", Inquiry 58(5):486–512. DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2015.1026391, https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2015.1026391
  12. Darrell P. Rowbottom (2021), "A methodological argument against scientific realism", Synthese 198(3):2153–2167 (first published online 2019). DOI: 10.1007/s11229-019-02197-7, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02197-7
  13. Seungbae Park (2022), "In Defense of the No-Miracles Argument", chapter 1 of Seungbae Park, Embracing Scientific Realism (Synthese Library, vol. 463), Cham: Springer, pp. 1–22. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-87813-9_1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87813-9_1