Scientific explanations of evidential consilience may be accepted without the explanations themselves being understood as true.

The argument from corroboration thus runs as follows. The fact that one and the same thing is apparently revealed by distinct modes of detection suggests that it would be an extraordinary coincidence if the supposed target of these revelations did not, in fact, exist. The greater the extent to which detections can be corroborated by different means, the stronger the argument for realism regarding their putative target. The argument here can be viewed as resting on an intuition similar to that un