  Colin Howson (2000), P.D. Magnus and Craig Callender (2004), and Peter Lipton (2004) have recently argued that the no-miracles argument is flawed because in order to evaluate the claim that it is probable that theories enjoying empirical success are approximately true we have to know what the relevant base rate is, and there is no way we can know this. Magnus and Callender argue that “wholesale” arguments that are intended to support realism (or antirealism) about science as a whole (rather than “retail” arguments that are applied to a specific theory) are only taken seriously because of our propensity to engage in the ‘base rate fallacy’ of evaluating probabilities without knowing all the relevant information. They think we ought to abandon the attempt to defend scientific realism in general rather than on a case-by-case basis.