How Should we Judge Current Scientific Theories?

The scientific realism-antirealism debate concerns theories in general. However, as soon as the discussion draws arguments from the historical development of science, some issues emerge concerning how we should regard current theories in particular, as opposed to past and future ones. Positions here range between two extremes: on the one hand a radical version of the pessimistic meta-induction (PMI) would have it that since all past theories older than 100 - 150 years have been proven radically false and rejected , all present and future theories will be rejected within 100-150 year, and there can be no truth in science (at most, empirical adequacy). On the opposite extreme blunt optimists like Doppelt (2007, 2011, 2014) or Park (2017a ... On treating differently....) hold that, given the astonishing qualitative and quantitative technical and methodological progress of research in the last century or so (Fahrbach 2011), current best theories are almost completely and exactly true, so that further progress, besides adding new knowledge, can at best correct minor details of present day theories: they will not be refuted, because they have a “unique status” in the history of their discipline, distinguishing them from other theories, since they “stand alone at the pinnacle of the entire field of inquiry” (Doppelt 2014, p. 285). But evidence is against both extremes: radical pessimism cannot explain why even the ancient and now rejected theories were predictively successful: some of their predictions were as precise as utterly unforeseen and unforeseeable, so that they couldn’t be gotten right except by a miracle. But an explanation of those successes is available, and it is that those theories had some true components which by themselves were sufficient to derive their predictions, and have actually been located by recent research. Therefore past theories were not completely false; hence, even the PMI cannot show that current theories are completely false. Again, radical pessimism cannot explain the rapidly increasing rate of success of science; which again, is plainly explained by the fact that the true components of older theories are typically preserved in current ones. On the other hand, it is a priory implausible that just now we have reached the “end of history” in scientific research, a sort of promised land of pure truths, or Peirce’s ideal limit of research, and that our science is infallible. We see the mistakes of past science, while we obviously cannot see those of present science, and this ingenerates the illusion that there are none. But we have seen the same illusion arising in the past, age after age, only to be deluded: in the 18th Century people thought Newton had definitely opened up for us God’s blueprint of the Universe. In 1874 Philipp von Jolly advised a young Max Planck against studying physics, because “In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes”. In addition, we positively know that there are mistakes in current theories because even two of the most successful ones, quantum mechanics and relativity, are at variance with one another and are beset by unsolved riddles. No doubt contemporary science has made astonishing empirical and methodological progresses with respect to past science. But also in modern science vs. medieval science, etc. Nonetheless, even in the past empirical knowledge and scientific methodology had improved steadily: for instance, they had improved a lot from 1000 AD to 1700 AD, yet many wrong theories were still held at that date, and even thereafter. So, is hard to think that any improvement of our background empirical knowledge and methods can at some point make scientists practically infallible; and even more that this point has already been reached. Brad Wray (2016) pointed out that, just like at any time there are unconceived alter