Abstract
According to the “no-miracles argument” (NMA), truth is the best explanation of the predictive-instrumental success of scientific theories. A standard objection against NMA is that it is viciously circular. In Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth Stathis Psillos has claimed that the circularity objection can be met when NMA is supplemented with a reliabilist approach to justification. I will try to show, however, that scientific realists cannot take much comfort from this policy: if reliabilism makes no qualifications about the domain where inference to the best explanation is reliable, scientific realists flagrantly beg the question. A qualified version of reliabilism, on the other side, does not entitle us to infer the realist conclusion. I conclude, then, that Psillos’s proposal does not make any significant progress for scientific realism.
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Notes
However, for an attempt to turn NMA into a valid deductive argument, see Musgrave (1999).
Incidentally, there is no argument in Psillos’s book to convince us that reliabilism is better than alternative theories of epistemic justification.
As P. Lipton has claimed: “Constructive empiricism and inference to the best explanation are widely supposed to be incompatible. Certainly champions of inference to the best explanation tend to be realists, and van Fraassen develops his case against inference to the best explanation as part of his argument for constructive empiricism. But the two views are in fact compatible, since one may have a constructive empiricist version of inference to the best explanation. To do this requires only that we construe ‘correct’ as empirically adequate rather than as true, and that we allow that false theories may explain.” (Lipton 1997, p. 95). For an instrumentalist reading of inference to the best explanation see also Fine (1991).
Leaving aside philosophical accounts of explanation, considering that C2 explains C2* is somewhat counterintuitive. Here is another example: “Members of the institute have some tasks” means that they have both administrative and research tasks; but if we inquire why members of the institute have administrative tasks, replying something like “because they have some tasks, that is, research tasks and administrative ones, as well” would hardly qualify as an appropriate explanation. Having said this, it must be acknowledged that there is no consensus on the notion of “explanatory goodness” among the advocates of inference to the best explanation (see Lipton 2004 and the contributions of Niiniluoto and Psillos in Stadler 2004).
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Acknowledgements
This work has been funded by the Ministerio español de Educación y Ciencia (Programa Ramón y Cajal) and by the Generalitat Valenciana (research project GV 06/22). A talk on this paper was delivered at the University of Dusseldorf on May 2008. I should thank Gerhard Schurz, Ioannis Votsis and Markus Werning for their helpful comments.
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Iranzo, V. Reliabilism and the Abductive Defence of Scientific Realism. J Gen Philos Sci 39, 115–120 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-008-9060-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-008-9060-2