The Miracle Argument
So much for explanation—and for IBE—in science. The same considerations apply to IBE in meta-science, to the so-called Miracle Argument for scientific realism. Here what is to be explained is not a fact about the world, like the scratching in the wall or the disappearing cheese.
What is to be explained is a fact about science, the fact that science is successful. The success in question is predictive success, the ability of a theory to yield true predictions about the observable, and the technological success that often depends upon this. The key claim is that the best explanation of a theory's predictive success is that it is true. Given this claim, IBE licenses reasonable belief in the truth of that theory.It is only consistent empirical success that can be explained in terms of truth. You cannot explain the partial success of a falsified theory in terms of its truth. (This is an important point, to which I shall return.) So the explanandum is of the form “All T's predictions about observable phenomena are true”, or (putting it in van Fraassen's terminology) “T is empirically adequate”, or (putting it in surrealist terminology, following Leplin 1993) “The observable phenomena are as if T were true”. The realist thought is, that T's actually being true is the best explanation of why all the observable phenomena are as if it were true.
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More on the topic The Miracle Argument:
- Agazzi E. (ed.). Varieties of Scientific Realism: Objectivity and Truth in Science. Springer,2017. — 411 pp., 2017
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