Abstract

Scientific realism, the view that our current successful theories are probably approximately true, is challenged by the pessimistic meta-induction, PMI, according to which many successful theories in the past of science were refuted later on. Realists often respond to the PMI by pointing out that sci-ence has improved a lot since the times of the past refuted theories, and these improvements block the PMI and save realism. Antirealists reply that past realists could have said the same thing, namely that science has improved a lot in the same manner as realists claim for the recent past, but those improvements didn’t help past realists, as the subsequent theory refutations show; hence, the recent improvements likewise don’t help current realists to block the PMI and save realism; therefore the realists’ response to the PMI fails. This argument is the pessimistic meta-meta-induction, which I aim to analyze and assess.