Once an experiment is done, the observations have been made and the data have been analyzed, what should scientists communicate to the world at large, and how should they do it? This, I will argue, is an intricate question, and one that philosophers can make a contribution to. I will illustrate these points by reference to the debate between Fisher and Neyman & Pearson in the 1950s, which I take to be, at heart, a debate about norms of scientific communication. (...) I will argue that scientists need a richer set of tools for communicating epistemic states that may be very nuanced, and will point to way in which philosophers can contribute. (shrink)

Additionally, the text shows how to develop computationally feasible methods to mesh with this framework.

In recent years, a revisionist process focused on logical positivism can be observed, particularly regarding Carnap’s work. In this paper, I argue against the interpretation that Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions having been published in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, co-edited by Carnap, is evidence of the revisionist idea that Carnap “would have found Structure philosophically congenial”. I claim that Kuhn’s book, from Carnap’s point of view, is not in philosophy of science but rather in history of science (...) (in the context of a sharp discovery–justification distinction). It could also explain the fact that, despite his sympathetic letters to Kuhn as editor, Carnap never refers to Kuhn’s book in his work in philosophy of science. (shrink)

We compare Carnap's and Kuhn's views on science. Although there are important differences between them, the similarities are striking. The basis for the latter is a pragmatically oriented semantic conventionalist picture of science, which suggests that the view that post-positivist philosophy of science constitutes a radical revolution which has no interesting affinities with logical positivism must be seriously mistaken.

In an important 2006 paper, Nishi Shah defends ‘evidentialism’, the position that only evidence for a proposition’s truth constitutes a reason to believe this proposition. In opposition to Shah, Anthony Robert Booth, Andrew Reisner and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen argue that things other than evidence of truth, so-called non-evidential or ‘pragmatic’ reasons, constitute reasons to believe a proposition. I argue that we can effectively respond to Shah’s pragmatist critics if, following Shah, we are careful to distinguish the evaluation of the reasons for (...) a belief from the process of actually forming a belief and allowing it to influence action. Drawing this distinction is assisted if we utilize Rudolf Carnap’s probabilistic interpretation of what it means to be disposed to believe a claim. (shrink)

The few extant arguments concerning the autonomy of science in the rational acceptance of hypotheses are examined. It is concluded that science is not morally autonomous, and that the attendant notion of rationality in science decisionmaking is inadequate. A more comprehensive notion of scientific rationality, which encompasses the old one, is proposed as a replacement. The general idea is that scientists qua scientist ought, in their acceptance decisions, to take into account the ethical consequences of acceptance as well as the (...) consequences with regard to the attainment of "purely scientific" or "epistemic" objectives. The result constitutes an argument for a (presumably cooperative) game theoretic treatment of inductive logic. (shrink)