An Inductive No-Miracles Argument

This paper defends a new argument in the spirit of Golemon and Graber’s Deductive No-Miracles Argument (DNMA) for scientific realism, recently criticized by Kok Yong Lee. While Lee argues that the DNMA is invalid or leads to a collapse in probability assignments, I develop an Inductive No-Miracles Argument (INMA) that preserves logical strength without relying on abductive inference or explanatory premises. By introducing an “approximately equal” probabilistic operator (≈), I show how probabilistic reasoning can license a strong inductive inference without collapsing probability calculus. The resulting INMA satisfies the desiderata motivating the DNMA and clarifies how probabilistic reasoning can underwrite realist inference without appeal to explanatory virtue. Moreover, the structure argued for seems ripe for use in other contexts where avoiding abduction in lieu of less theory-laden probability is attractive, such as fine-tuning arguments and evolutionary debunking arguments.