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Science, Probability, and the Proposition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Bas C. van Fraassen
Bas C. van Fraassen*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Traditionally, philosophy of science has focused on the product of science: the scientific hypothesis, principle, law, or more grandiosely, the theory. Using logician's license I'll think of hypotheses and theories as ‘little’ and ‘big’ (or ‘weak’ and ‘strong’) propositions. The tradition spoke of the product as (scientific) knowledge; the more recent phrase “current scientific opinion” carries the same connotation of uniqueness. For this to make sense, something is required: a proposition must be capable of being true or false, capable of being fully believed or disbelieved (and if you like, known).

Probabilism requires us to look at every aspect of science in a new way. In his radical brand of probabilism, Richard Jeffrey told us to reconceptualize knowledge as 'probable knowledge’ and propositions as ‘probasitions’—and never to resolve doubt but simply to quantify it, keeping all possibilities in play.

Type
Part XI. Probability and the Art of Judgment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 338 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

All technical details for this paper can be found in my “Fine- grained opinion, conditional probability, and the logic of full belief, in the Journal of Philosophical Logic (1995). The present adaptation of those results is offered on behalf of the contention that general epistemology and scientific methodology are each other writ small and writ large respectively (not necessarily in that order).

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