HAPSAT Graduate Workshops - Third Fall Session

HAPSAT GRADUATE WORKSHOPS

The Reverse No Miracles Argument

In-person event | Wednesday, December 3 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m.

VC303

Abstract: According to Stathis Psillos, scientific realism is “the view that mature and genuinely successful theories should be accepted as nearly true (1999, p. xvii).” The most important argument for this view is the No Miracle Argument (NMA). Unfortunately, antirealists have identified a number of problems with the NMA, such as underdetermination, Pessimistic Meta Induction, the Inference to the Best Explanation problem, and the base rate fallacy, among others. I propose an alternate argument, which I call the Reverse No Miracles Argument (Reverse NMA). The conventional NMA attempts to argue that scientific theories are true because it would be a miracle if scientific theories were false in spite of all their many successful predictions, such as the predicted value of the electron’s magnetic moment being verified to 11 decimal places. I argue that the Reverse NMA bypasses the NMA’s identified deficiencies because it strives to be more modest. Instead of arguing for their truth, the Reverse NMA ignores scientific theories entirely. My argument is that it would be a statistical miracle if the observed patterns in our empirical data are completely coincidental. This allows us to conclude that external reality is an ordered place, at least partly. Because the scientific community derives its theories with reference to the patterns identified from its empirical data sets, I argue that many methods employed in science can be justified using the Reverse NMA.

Workshop Organizer: Rebecca Muscant