An A Priori Refutation of the Classical Pessimistic Induction

According to the Classical Pessimistic Induction (CPI), otherwise positive features like predictive and explanatory success actually cast doubt on theories that display them. After all, they negatively correlate with truth. From this historical track record, it is inferred that current best theories are probably not (even approximately) true. The CPI is often wielded against realists about science, but others like Hume (Moral philosophy. Geoffrey Sayre McCord (ed), Hackett Publishing Company, 1757), Pareto (The mind and society, vol 1. (Arthur Livingston, Trans.), Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1935), and Hájek (in: Green and Williams (eds) Moore’s paradox: new essays on belief, rationality, and the first person, Oxford University Press, 2007) extend it to philosophical theories more generally. In this paper, I unveil a priori refutations that defang the CPI in all its guises. To date, treatments of this topic typically assume the following: if the historical proportion of false theories increases, then it has increasingly negative bearing against realism. I show that this assumption is false. I identify three types of problems for the CPI, each attaching to some interpretation or other. The first problem is that the CPI violates a universal adequacy condition on the confirmation relation that restricts the relationship between entailment and disconfirmation. The second problem is that the induction’s target hypotheses preclude the track record from instantiating a list of epistemically significant properties that empirical information is supposed to afford. The third problem is that it is constitutively impossible for the CPI to have random samples; this implies that even the use of randomization procedures cannot help. In sum: my refutation is novel, accessible by pure reflection, and quite general.