The Anti-induction for Scientific Realism

Abstract

In contemporary philosophy of science, the no-miracles argument and the pessimistic induction are regarded as the strongest arguments for and against scientific realism, respectively. In this paper, the author constructs a new argument for scientific realism, which he calls the anti-induction for scientific realism. It holds that, since past theories were false, present theories are true. The author provides an example from the history of science to show that anti-inductions sometimes work in science. The anti-induction for scientific realism has several advantages over the no-miracles argument as a positive argument for scientific realism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.