Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-mzp66 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-28T21:53:53.705Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Empirical and Rational Components in Scientific Confirmation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Abner Shimony
Abner Shimony*
Affiliation:
Boston University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A common device in popular presentations of science is a sequence of views from cosmic to terrestrial to local to microscopic, thereby placing the subject to which the program is devoted in a proper perspective. I wish to use an adaptation of this device to place the announced topic of our panel — “Do Explanations or Predictions Provide More Evidential Support for Scientific Theories?” — in perspective. My four steps, from the largest to the smallest scale, are the following:

  1. 1. A brief summary of the world view suggested by the discoveries of the natural sciences and by philosophical reflections on them;

  2. 2. a consideration of the methodology for scientific investigation, upon assumption that this world view is approximately correct;

  3. 3. the formulation of a version of Bayesian scientific inference satisfying the desiderata of step 2;

  4. 4. the topic of our panel — explanation vs. prediction.

Type
Part V. Do Explanations or Predictions (or Neither) Provide More Evidential Support for Scientific Theories?
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. 146 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, grant no. SBE-9223678.

References

Aristotle (1941), “Posterior Analytics”, in McKeon, R. (ed.) The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Carnap, R. (1962), Logical Foundations of Probability, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Christenson, J.H., Cronin, J.W., Fitch, V., and Turlay, R. (1964), “Evidence for the 2-pi decay of the KO2 meson”, Physical Review Letters 13: 138–140.10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.138CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeFinetti, B. (1937), “La prevision: ses lois logiques, ses sources subjectives”, Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincare’ 7: 1–68.Google Scholar
Dewey, J. (1938), Logic: the Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Edelman, G. (1987), Neural Darwinism. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Franklin, A. (1986), The Neglect of Experiment. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franklin, A. (1993), “Discovery, pursuit, and justification”, Perspectives in Science 1: 252–284.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (1967), “Slightly more realistic personal probability”, Philosophy of Science 34: 311–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeffreys, H. (1961), Theory of Probability, 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Kabir, P.K. (1968), The CP Puzzle. New York and London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Peirce, C.S. (1934), Collected Papers, vol. 5. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Keynes, J.M. (1921), A Treatise on Probability. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Popper, K.R. (1968), Conjectures and Refutations. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Ramsey, F.P. (1931), “Truth and probability”, in The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays. London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Savage, L.J. (1954), Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Shimony, A. (1970), “Scientific inference”, in Colodny, R. (ed.), The Nature and Function of Scientific Theories. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 79–172. Reprinted in Shimony, A. (1993), Search for a Naturalistic World View, vol.1. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shimony, A. (1993), “Reconsiderations on inductive inference”, in Search for a Naturalistic World View, vol. 1. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 274–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, E.B. (1951), An Introduction to Scientific Research. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar