Abstract
Lipton contends that the no-miracle argument is illegitimate, because it fails to adduce new evidence beyond that cited by scientists for their theories. The debate on this issue between Lipton and Psillos has focussed on whether there is a construal of the no-miracle argument in relation to first-order scientific inferences that can yield new evidence. I move away from this focus without taking sides, and argue that the no-miracle argument, on its two popular interpretations, is as legitimate, cogent, and useful an inductive argument for scientific realism as first-order scientific inferences to the best explanation even if it does not add to scientific evidence.
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Notes
Philosophers such as Alexander Bird (1998, 141–3) also have some serious reservation about the no-miracle argument.
In evaluating this objection, we have to take into account Lipton’s (2001, 349; 2004, 186–92) peculiar view of the no-miracle argument as one that is only useful for settling an internal dispute between scientific realists. He thinks that the argument has no probative force for scientific antirealists, given their rejection of the realist version of IBE. The argument is only good for scientific realists to confirm scientific realism (2004, 182–92), and is thus ‘preaching to the convert’ (2001, 349). An upshot is that the no-new-evidence objection is a matter of intramural dispute between scientific realists.
One may dispute whether this is strictly-speaking a tight circle. But this is Lipton’s problem. This section only summarises his argument.
My argument still works even if one adopts a novel interpretation of the evidence (or explanandum) of the no-miracle argument in terms of the distribution of successful theories among competing theories, as suggested by Cornelis Menke (2014). On such an interpretation, the no-miracle argument is either a second-order argument (if the evidence is not part of the first-order, scientific case) or one of the first-order scientific IBEs. Either way, the no-new-evidence objection won’t work, as explained above.
References
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Menke, C. (2014). Does the miracle argument embody a base rate fallacy? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 45, 103–108.
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Acknowledgment
A version of this paper was presented at the Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore in May 2009. I am especially grateful to John Greenwood, Michael Pelczar, Axel Gelfert, Neil Sinhababu, and Hui-Chieh Loy for their comments and criticisms in several extensive discussions. An earlier version of a paper on this topic in which I provide a completely different argument for a similar conclusion was presented at the 13th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at Tsing Hua University, Beijing in August 2007. Thanks to Patrick Maher, the chairman of the session in which I presented the paper, for his helpful comments. I am most grateful to Tim Lewens and the late Peter Lipton, who discussed that version of the paper with me at the University of Cambridge.
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Lee, WY. Should the No-Miracle Argument Add to Scientific Evidence?. Philosophia 42, 999–1004 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9524-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9524-z