Evidence  

Oleh:

Sober, Elliott

Jenis: Article from Books - E-Book
Dalam koleksi: Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science, page 1-108.
Topik: Royall’s Three Questions; The ABCs of Bayesianism; Likelihoodism; Tests and Probabilistic Modus Tollens; Neyman–Pearson Hypothesis Testing; Stopping Rules; Model-Selection Theory
Fulltext: Evidence.pdf (702.05KB)

Isi artikel

Scientists and philosophers of science often emphasize that science is a fallible enterprise. The evidence that scientists have for their theories does not render those theories certain. This point about evidence is often represented by citing a fact about logic: The evidence we have at hand does not deductively entail that our theories must be true. In a deductively valid argument, the conclusion must be true if the premises are. Consider the following old saw: All human beings are mortal. Socrates is a human being. Socrates is mortal. If the premises are true, you cannot go wrong in believing the conclusion. The standard point about science’s fallibility is that the relationship of evidence to theory is not like this. The correctness of this point is most obvious when the theories in question are far more general than the evidence we can bring to bear on them. For example, theories in physics such as the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics make claims about what is true at all places and all times in the entire universe. Our observations, however, are limited to a very small portion of that immense totality. What happens here and now (and in the vicinity thereof) does not deductively entail what happens in distant places and at times remote from our own. If the evidence that science assembles does not provide certainty about which theories are true, what, then, does the evidence tell us? It seems entirely natural to say that science uses the evidence at hand to say which theories are probably true. This statement leaves room for science to be fallible and for the scienti?c picture of the world to change when new evidence rolls in. As sensible as this position sounds, it is deeply controversial. The controversy I have in mind is not between science and nonscience; I do not mean that scientists view themselves as assessing how probable theories are while postmodernists and religious zealots debunk science and seek to undermine its authority. No, the controversy I have in mind is alive within science. For the past seventy years, there has been a dispute in the foundations of statistics between Bayesians and frequentists. They disagree about many issues, but perhaps their most basic disagree- ment concerns whether science is in a position to judge which theories are probably true. Bayesians think that the answer is yes while frequentists emphatically disagree. This controversy is not con?ned to a question that statisticians and philosophers of science address; scientists use the methods that statisticians make available, and so scientists in all ?elds must choose which model of scienti?c reasoning they will adopt.

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