Convergence Arguments in the Philosophy of Science

Abstract

A convergence argument occurs when multiple people agree in their testimony about the occurrence of an empirical phenomenon, and then conclude that this phenomenon is real. It is often thought that convergence arguments provide special support for their conclusions. For example, in the philosophy of science, robustness arguments are convergence arguments where different experimental approaches display the same phenomenon, and in political science the Condorcet Jury Theorem is based on a convergence argument where majority decision making is claimed to point to true propositions. The plan of this paper is to assess the quality of convergence arguments. Two kinds of convergence arguments are identified: conditional independence convergence arguments and intersection of independent lies convergence arguments. Though both kinds of arguments are immensely popular amongst a variety of philosophers, my plan is to repudiate their epistemic significance, and instead argue that we should follow the strategy of coherence arguments, the format of which I discuss at the end of the paper.