Alan Musgrave

Alan Edward Musgrave (5 June 1940 – 20 January 2026) was a New Zealand philosopher. He was a professor at the University of Otago. Musgrave was educated at the London School of Economics with a BA Honours philosophy and economics in 1961. Karl Popper supervised Musgrave's PhD, which was completed in 1969. Musgrave worked as Popper's research assistant, initially, then as a lecturer. He was appointed to the chair of the philosophy department at the University of Otago in 1970, and was head of department from 1970 to 2005. Along with Imre Lakatos, a friend and colleague, they edited 'Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge' (Cambridge University Press, 1970). It is the best-selling of the four volumes that record the Popper/Kuhn confrontation at the 1965 London Conference that Lakatos and Musgrave organised. In 1992, Musgrave published 'Common Sense, Science and Scepticism', an entry-level book on epistemology. In 1999, Musgrave published 'Essays on Realism and Rationalism' (Rodopi), a collection of his scholarly papers. In 2006, Musgrave was honoured with a 'Festschrift': 'Rationality and Reality: Conversations with Alan Musgrave', edited by Colin Cheyne and John Worrall (Springer). In 2009, Musgrave published 'Secular Sermons: Essays on Science and Philosophy' (Otago University Press), an entry-level book on science, religion and mathematics. Among his non-scholarly achievements was the ranking of Otago's Department of Philosophy in New Zealand's Performance Based Research Funding. In both the 2003 and 2006 surveys, Otago's Philosophy department ranked as the best performing department among all academic disciplines in New Zealand. In 2010, the University of Otago embarked on a funding campaign to raise money towards a scholarship in his honour. In 2012, the University of Otago awarded Musgrave the Distinguished Research Medal, the university's highest research honour. Musgrave died in Dunedin on 20 January 2026, at the age of 85. His chief interest was in epistemology, history and philosophy of science, especially the Philosophy of Biology. The largest part of his career was dedicated to the study of Charles Darwin. Throughout his career, he defended scientific realism and scientific rationalism, and he was often considered their chief contemporary defender. He attacked various forms of idealism; most recently he attacked idealism by extending the argument popularly known as David Stove's 'Gem'. Metaphysically speaking, Musgrave can be considered a nominalist; he argued for a position he specifically called Pleonastic Platonism. This position basically claims that confusions within our language gives rise to Platonic entities. Pleonastic is a term with Greek roots meaning 'excessive'. Many of his works exhibit influence from Sir Karl Popper – his teacher as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the London School of Economics. He also shared an office with fellow philosopher Imre Lakatos while he was in London. His form of Rationalism is subject, he admitted, to circularity; but, he insisted, it is better (even if only slightly better) than Popper's Rationalism, which admits to irrationalism. However, his form of scientific realism is much stronger. His position did not assert that science is correct, only that we may reasonably accept certain parts of it to be correct. Electrons, for example, may not exist; but that does not mean we should not believe in them. His main criterion for believing in a scientific theory was that it generates 'novel predictions.' He was one of the few philosophers of science, on either side of the debate, to stress the distinction between novel predictions and regular predictions. A novel prediction is one that was not used in the construction of a theory, but that nevertheless follows from it. If a scientific theory makes an accurate prediction about something unknown (as opposed to a known regularity), then the theory must either be true, or the accurate 'novel' prediction was miraculously guessed. This argument had previously been applied to all scientific predictions, by many philosophers of science (the most famous, perhaps, being Hilary Putnam, who coined the clause 'Realism is the only philosophy that doesn't make science a miracle'). This aphorism however, has been criticised as being merely a chimera of sophism, used mostly for its seductive force rather than its substance. Nevertheless, Musgrave was in a smaller group by stressing that the argument can only succeed if applied solely to novel predictions. This claim however, cannot be defended logically as it commits the petitio principii fallacy of assuming, without adequate justification, the conclusion it is supposed to defend. However, while admitting circularity within the argument (in that "miracle arguments" seek to justify scientific "inference to the best explanation" by use of an inference to the best explanation), Musgrave defended his stance as one making a conclusion about rational belief rather than truth. Because he made this distinction about knowing for certain that a theory is right, and reasonably believing that a theory is right, he evaded many classical objections to realism.