Miracles and structural realism

John Worrall

pp. 77-95

in: Elaine Landry, Dean P. Rickles (eds), Structural realism, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

Structural realism claims to be the "best of both worlds' by reconciling the two main considerations in the scientific realism debate–the No Miracles Argument (NMA) and the Pessimistic Induction (PI)–which had initially seemed to pull in opposite directions. More recently both the NMA and the PI have been argued to be fallacious (both allegedly committing "the base rate fallacy"). If so, this would clearly undermine structural realism. This chapter concentrates just on the NMA and argues that a fallacy results only if the argument is formalised in ways that should always have been recognised as inappropriate. The underlying intuition remains untouched and remains a good, though of course far from conclusive, reason for adopting structural realism.