The Pessimistic Meta-Induction Argument and Scientific Realism: The Referential Approaches

According to the “No Miracle argument” (NM), the predictive and explanatory success of science would be difficult, if not impossible, to explain unless mature scientific theories were approximately true, and the theoretical entities postulated by them exist. On the contrary, in his version of “the Pessimistic Meta-Induction argument” (PMI), Laudan, by providing a list of past successful and yet false theories, rejects any relationship between success of a theory and its truth. In response to Laudan, based on the referential approach, realists have tried to show that the central terms of many past successful theories refer after all, and their postulated entities do exist. Moreover, theses terms and their referents have been preserved in the successive theories. In this paper, first, NM and PMI will be explained. Then, the most important realists’ solutions to PMI in the referential approach will be evaluated critically. It will be shown that none of these solutions can rebut PMI conclusively. In the final part of the paper, however, it will be explained briefly that even if realists could not rebut the PMI challenge, the advantage of the referential approach is that still allows them to save a weak version of scientific realism, entitled “existential realism”.