Abstract

Two powerful arguments have famously dominated the realism debate in philosophy of science: The No Miracles Argument and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction. A standard response to the PMI is selective scientific realism, wherein only the working posits of a theory are considered worthy of doxastic commitment. Building on the recent debate over the NMA and the connections between the NMA and the PMI, I here consider a stronger inductive argument that poses a direct challenge for SSR: Because it is sometimes exactly the working posits which contradict each other, i.e., that which is directly responsible for empirical success, SSR cannot deliver a general explanation of scientific success.