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Safety, Strength, Simplicity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Nelson Goodman
Nelson Goodman*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

When the evidence leaves us with a choice among hypotheses of unequal strength, how is the choice to be made?

Caution would counsel us to choose the weakest, the hypothesis that asserts the least, since it is the least likely to fail us later. But the principle of maximum safety quickly reduces to absurdity; for it always dictates the choice of a hypothesis that does not go beyond the evidence at all.

Type
A Panel Discussion of Simplicity of Scientific Theories
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 1961 , pp. 150 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1961

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References

1 In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1959—from the German of 1935), especially Chapters VI and VII.

2 Harvard University Press, 1955; see especially Chapter IV.