This paper challenges the pessimistic meta-inductive argument against scientific realism by undermining its inductive step rather than its historical premise. Although related challenges already exist, I develop a new one. Drawing on a general epistemology of scientific inference developed in frequentist statistics, machine learning, and formal epistemology, I evaluate induction in terms of convergence to the truth. I argue that ordinary enumerative induction can achieve everywhere convergence, whereas meta-induction fails even to achieve almost everywhere convergence. Indeed, in the problem context where meta-induction arises, the failure is deeper: no inference method whatsoever achieves almost everywhere convergence.
Medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely expected to transform clinical practice, yet the decision-making processes of many Machine Learning (ML) models remain opaque. Explainability has been advanced as a partial remedy to clarify why AI generates predictions, particularly in high-stakes contexts. Despite ongoing efforts, debates on what constitutes an adequate medical explanation remain unsettled. Yet, explanation has long been a central topic of inquiry in the philosophy of science and medicine. The insights developed in these fields, however, have been largely overlooked in contemporary explainable AI (XAI) research, leaving its foundational assumptions insufficiently examined. To address this gap, this paper develops a critical review at the intersection of philosophy of science and XAI. It examines prevailing accounts of what counts as an explanation in the health sciences and assesses their adequacy for informing XAI in medicine, arguing that they provide necessary conditions for a philosophically grounded approach to explainability in this domain. Building on this foundational philosophical literature, the discussion identifies three central axes of analysis: the role of causality in medical reasoning, the epistemic and relational dimensions of medical trust, and the criteria of explanatory adequacy as shaped by the pragmatic needs of diverse stakeholders. By integrating philosophical analysis with current developments in medical AI, the paper outlines principles for designing XAI systems that offer explanations that are not only epistemically robust but also aligned with the epistemic and practical requirements of clinical decision-making, shaping ongoing debates in medical XAI toward underexplored conceptual foundations.
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has intensified debates about their significance for linguistic theory. These debates are commonly divided into three positions: insulationism, which regards LLMs as irrelevant to human language; eliminativism, which claims that LLMs can replace traditional linguistic theories; and conciliationism, which views them as useful tools for linguistic research. To clarify these positions, this paper applies the framework of modal modeling from the philosophy of science. We argue that LLMs possess genuine epistemic value as minimal models, even without structural correspondence to human cognition. In particular, they can provide how-possibly explanations (HPEs) by testing modal claims about language acquisition and linguistic competence. We then examine the conditions under which LLMs could qualify as how-actually explanations (HAEs) of human language, drawing on the mechanistic account of scientific explanation. We argue that current LLMs do not yet satisfy these requirements. On the basis of this analysis, we propose understanding the explanatory power of LLMs as lying on a continuum between HPEs and HAEs. This framework avoids both overstating and understating their explanatory significance and offers a more precise basis for evaluating the role of LLMs in the scientific study of language.