The no-miracles argument and the pessimistic induction are arguably the main considerations for and against scientific realism. Recently these arguments have been accused of embodying a familiar, seductive fallacy. In each case, we are tricked by a base rate fallacy, one much-discussed in the psychological literature. In this paper we consider this accusation and use it as an explanation for wh...

Realists in international relations and realistic conflict theorists in social psychology argue that the perception of threat in intergroup conflict is a function of power asymmetries between groups. In contrast, social constructivists and social identity theorists argue that a shared sense of identity can reduce perceptions of intergroup threat. In this article, we test these competing argumen...

A realist view of numbers often rests on the following thesis: statements like ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ are identity statements in which the copula is flanked by singular terms whose semantic function consists in referring to a number (henceforth: Identity). On the basis of Identity the realists argue that the assertive use of such statements commits us to numbers. Recently, som...

Pyrrhonists provide a way of investigating the world in which conflicting views about a given topic are critically compared, assessed, and juxtaposed. Since Pyrrhonists are ultimately unable to decide between these views, they end up suspending judgment about the issues under examination. In this paper, I consider the question of whether Pyrrhonists can be realists or anti-realists about scienc...

In social science (and beyond of course), disagreement and debate are ubiquitous. Within IR there was for example the interparadigm debate and, more recently, the controversy between positivists and critical realists. Scholars commonly feel they need to take stance in these discussions, but often lack understanding of the exact nature of the disagreement they are having. For what exactly is at ...

Strawson (1994) and Peacocke (1992) introduced thought experiments that show that it seems intuitive that there is, in some way, an experiential character to mental events of understanding. Some (e.g., Siewert 1998, 2011; Pitt 2004) try to explain these intuitions by saying that just as we have, say, headache experiences and visual experiences of blueness, so too we have experiences of understa...

The study of conoict and cooperation has been an enduring task of scholars, with the most recent arguments being between realists and neoliberal institutionalists.1 Most students of the subject believe that realists argue that international politics is characterized by great conoict and that institutions play only a small role. They also believe that neoliberals claim that cooperation is more e...

A well-rehearsed move among teleological realists in the philosophy of biology is to base the idea of genuinely teleological forms of organic self-reproduction on a type of causality derived from Kant. Teleological realists have long argued for the causal possibility of this form of causality--in which a whole is considered the cause of its parts--as well as formulated a set of teleological cri...

A finite data set is consistent with infinitely many alternative theories. Scientific realists recommend that we prefer the simplest one. Anti-realists ask how a fixed simplicity bias could track the truth when the truth might be complex. It is no solution to impose a prior probability distribution biased toward simplicity, for such a distribution merely embodies the bias at issue without expla...

A finite data set is consistent with infinitely many alternative theories. Scientific realists recommend that we prefer the simplest one. Anti-realists ask how a fixed simplicity bias could track the truth when the truth might be complex. It is no solution to impose a prior probability distribution biased toward simplicity, for such a distribution merely embodies the bias at issue without expla...