Abstract
On the basis of Levin’s claim that truth is not a scientific explanatory factor, Michel Ghins argues that the “no miracle” argument (NMA) is not scientific, therefore scientific realism is not a scientific hypothesis, and naturalism is wrong. I argue that there are genuine senses of ‘scientific’ and ‘explanation’ in which truth can yield scientific explanations. Hence, the NMA can be considered scientific in the sense that it hinges on a scientific explanation, it follows a typically scientific inferential pattern (IBE), and it is based on an empirical fact (the success of science). Scientific realism, in turn, is scientific in the sense that it is supported both by a meta-level scientific argument (the NMA), and by first level scientific arguments through semantic ascent and generalization. However, both the NMA and scientific realism are not purely scientific, since they go beyond properly scientific concerns, and require additional philosophical reasoning. In turn, naturalism is correct in the sense that philosophy is continuous with science, partly based on it, and potentially equally well warranted. Beside denying the scientific nature of the NMA, Ghins raises some objections to its cogency, to which I reply in the final section.
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Notes
I.e., the success of predictions both about phenomena largely independent of human intervention, and about the behaviour of artefacts engineered for practical purposes.
I owe this remark to an anonymous referee for EJPS.
Granted, we can become convinced that ‘e’ was exactly true if this follows from the theory ‘T’, and we have already accepted the theory as patrue. But if we ‘e’ is to serve as an empirical test of ‘T’, we are only warranted to assume that ‘e’ is atrue.
It might be objected that an even better explanation is that the theory is true simpliciter, for a totally and exactly true theory is more likely to have success than a merely patrue one. But the goodness of an explanation depends also on how likely the explanans is, not only on how likely it makes the explanandum. Now, we know that it is most unlikely that we get a totally and exactly true theory. So patruth (which includes simple truth as a limiting case) is the best balance.
Dennis Dieks objected that this answer in turn calls for a further explanation: patruth is much stronger than empirical adequacy; so, finding a patrue theory is a priori less likely than finding a merely empirically adequate one: how has the theorist been able to do that? But we can at least envisage a strategy for answering this question: viz., by arguing that scientists are partially reliable in tracking truth, thanks to the constitution of the world, the working of human cognitive abilities, the nature of scientific method, etc. On the opposite, no such strategy is in sight for explaining how scientists could search for empirically adequate theories if not by searching for patrue theories. How could one divine unknown and widely disparate phenomena, if not by getting some hold on their common causes?
Of course, there is no question that SR is ‘scientific’ in the sense that it concerns science (in particular, scientific claims about unobservable entities or structures).
I owe this remark, almost literally, to an anonymous referee for EJPS.
In principle, they might even be radically false; but the probability of an agreement between radically wrong observations and predictions is enough small to be disregarded.
According to sense data theorists, if ‘e1,e2,…en’ refers to sense data, we can claim to have observed e 1 ,e 2 ,…e n without qualifications. But critics of sense data have shown that even such a claim would be fallible; and at any rate, it wouldn’t help in confirming theories, since they concern objective states of things.
One might object that it is certain that T would have the consequences e 1 ,e 2 ,…e n (which is likely to be the empirical facts we have actually observed, even if due to the limited accuracy of observation we can only claim to have observed a e 1 ,e 2 ,…e n ), but it is not certain that pa T would have the same consequences; so, the best explanation of what we observed is actually that T. However, as argued in footnote 5, the goodness of an explanation depends both on how probable the explanans is and on how probable it makes the explanandum, and pa T is much more probable than T. Moreover, a e 1 ,e 2 ,…e n is weaker, hence a priori more probable, than e 1 ,e 2 ,…e n ; and if the consequences are only athose that would follow from T, then probably also T is only pathe case. Finally, in (2ii) we are clearly talking of what appears to us as the best explanation; and we know that there are so many reasons why we might be at least partially wrong or imprecise. So, even if we wrote (2ii) as
2ii’ If T, this would be the best explanation of a e 1 ,e 2 ,…e n ,
we could not infer that T, but only infer that paT, so the conclusion (2iii) would remain unchanged.
In § 1 I argued, against Laudan and Lyons, that the patruth of ‘T’ can explain its success even if it does not imply it, because an explanans need not make the explanandum certain or probable, but just raise its probability.
For, as seen earlier for the semantic ascent to the patruth of theories, ‘e1,e2,…en’ is atrue if and only if it is athe case that e1,e2,…en, i.e., if and only if the facts a e 1 ,e 2 ,…e n obtain.
As we have seen, it holds for any theory ‘T’ that only its patruth can make at least moderately probable that its novel and surprising empirical consequences are atrue; therefore, the patruth of ‘T’ is the best explanation of the atruth of its consequences, hence of their confirmation, hence of its own success.
Of course, this is not an attempt to define ‘explanation’ in terms of ‘because’, which would be more or less circular. It is just another way to stress the difference between inferences and explanations.
As explained by Ghins’ just quoted footnote 4, p. 125, this logical consequence can be both deductive or inductive. Moreover, as noticed earlier, all talk about truth here and in the following quotation can be understood as applying to patruth as well.
All instances of the scheme «‘T’ is true iff T» are true just by definition (of ‘true’ and of the quotation commas). So, given these definitions, they are true necessarily and a priori. In other words, the actual sentence «‘T’ is true» is true (i.e., true in the actual world, with its actual meaning) of all possible worlds in which the sentence «T» exists with its actual meaning and of which «T» is true (in the actual world, with its actual meaning).
This is probably not what historically happened, but it is at least verisimilar: see Worrall (1989).
Hence, it is usually dropped, in obedience to Grice’s (1975) conversational maxims.
Sankey (2000) made a similar point, to which Ghins replies that he cannot see any “functional and … quantifiable connection … between truth and success”, and that “the actual correspondence between ‘T’ and what it represents is not a scientific … factor (127). But I have argued that though scientific factors must be involved in the explanation, the explanans need not be one of them, and there need not a “functional and quantifiable connection” between the explanans and the explanandum.
This phrasing of the objection was suggested by an anonymous referee.
Obviously plain truth cannot be considered an alternative explanation, since it is a particular case of patruth. See also footnote 5.
I owe this criticism to an anonymous referee.
To begin with, it may be difficult to distinguish the actual from apparent claims of a theory: what in the theory should be taken as part of the reality it represents, and what as part of its “form of representation”? For instance, if a theory employs a coordinate system, is it therefore ontologically committed to it? A possible answer is Quine’s (1948) “quantified variable” criterion: a theory commits us only to what it explicitly claims to exist. Granted, even explicit existential claims sometimes should not be taken literally, but as idealizations, or useful fictions, computational devices, etc. But there is a wide literature on how to decide these questions: for instance, claims like the existence of extensionless mass-points, of free-falling bodies, etc., which contradict some of the basic tenets of the discipline, or of the very theory in which they occur, are not to be taken as true. We need not take literally the existence of entities such as, e.g., the average British teenager, which are eliminable without any loss of literal content, only at the cost of a longer and more complex formulation of the theory. Etc. In this connection, an anonymous referee for EJPS objected that if idealizations, or useful fictions, computational devices, etc. (henceforth: fictions) are used in arriving at predictions, they qualify as constituents responsible for the theory’s success. Therefore, how can we deny that they are among the actual commitments of the theory, in fact, among the claims we are warranted in believing? The relevant literature answers by pointing out that we have reasons to believe in the atruth of a constituent only if it was essentially or indispensably used in the derivation of a novel successful prediction (Leplin 1997, ch. 2, 3; Psillos 1999, 110; Scerri and Worrall 2001, 418); for, if a fiction is used to accommodate a known set of data D (as it is often the case), there is an explanation of the success in “predicting” D much better than its atruth (viz., that D was known beforehand to the theorist). But even if the fiction is used to derive a novel prediction P, we don’t need to believe it if it is not used essentially: i.e., if it entails a weaker constituent C from which P could equally have been derived: for then the atruth of the fiction is neither the only nor the most plausible explanation, a better explanation being the atruth of C. For instance, should we find that the idealization “X is a frictionless plain” was used in deriving a novel confirmed prediction P, most probably we would also find that P might as well have been inferred from the weaker claim “X is an approximately frictionless plain”, or “X is a frictionless plain to such and such practical purposes”, which is then reasonable to deem true. Looking at a real science example, Dalton derived his true law of multiple proportions by using a false principle of simplicity:
PS: Where two elements A and B form only one compound, its compound atom contains one atom of A and one of B. If a second compound exists, its atoms will contain two of A and one of B, and a third will be composed of one of A and two of B, etc. (Hudson 1992, p. 81).
But PS entails the weaker and true “principle of multiple quantities”
PMQ: The quantity of atoms of B combining with a given number of atoms of A is always multiple of a given number,
from which one could also derive the Law of multiple proportions
LMP: The weights of one element that combine with a fixed weight of the other are in a ratio of small whole numbers.
Of course, even after the actual commitments of the theory have been identified, it may be difficult to tell which ones are really involved in explaining the empirical evidence at hand (and so are supported by it), and which ones are not. Given the at least partly holistic nature of confirmation, confirmatory arguments may not by themselves say a final word on this question. But this does not show that those arguments cannot support a theory at all, otherwise we should drop not just the NMA, but also many first level arguments used by scientists.
In principle, it might even happen that more than one subset of the claims of one theory (or of different theories) offered an approximately equally good explanation of the evidence; in such cases our criteria of explanatory goodness could not decide which subset to believe, but it would at least be warranted to believe that the disjunction of those subsets is atrue.
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Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Michel Ghins for encouragement and stimulating criticism on earlier drafts of this paper. Moreover, I thank Howard Sankey, Greg Rastall, Dennis Dieks, Giorgio Volpe, Pierluigi Graziani, Vincenzo Fano and various anonymous referees for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, and EJPS, for many useful comments and suggestions.
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Alai, M. Levin and Ghins on the “no miracle” argument and naturalism. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 2, 85–110 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-011-0028-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-011-0028-4