Amalgamating evidence from heterogeneous sources and across levels of inquiry is becoming increasingly important in many pure and applied sciences. This special issue provides a forum for researchers from diverse scientific and philosophical perspectives to discuss evidence amalgamation, its methodologies, its history, its pitfalls, and its potential. We situate the contributions therein within six themes from the broad literature on this subject: the variety-of-evidence thesis, the philosophy of meta-analysis, the role of robustness/sensitivity analysis for evidence amalgamation, its bearing on questions (...) of extrapolation and external validity of experiments, its connection with theory development, and its interface with causal inference, especially regarding causal theories of cancer. (shrink)

There are various ``classical'' arguments against abduction as a logic of discovery,especially that (1) abduction is too weak a mode of inference to be of any use, and (2) in basic formulation of abduction the hypothesisis already presupposed to be known, so it is not the way hypotheses are discovered in the first place. In this paper I argue, by bringing forth the idea of strategies,that these counter-arguments are weaker than may appear. The concept of strategies suggests, inter alia, that (...) many inferential moves are taken into account at the same time. This is especially important in abductive reasoning, which is basically a very weak mode of inference. The importance of strategic thinking can already be seen in Charles S.Peirce's early treatments of the topic, and N.R.Hanson's later writings on abduction although they did not use the concept of``strategies.'' On the whole, I am arguing that the focus should be more on methodological processes, and not only on validity considerations, which have dominated the discussion about abduction. (shrink)

Essential to Peirce's distinction among three kinds of reasoning, deduction, induction and abduction, is the claim that each is correlated to a unique species of validity irreducible to that of the others. In particular, abductive validity cannot be analyzed in either deductive or inductive terms, a consequence of considerable importance for the logical and epistemological scrutiny of scientific methods. But when the full structure of abductive argumentation — as viewed by the mature Peirce — is clarified, every inferential step in (...) the process can be seen to dissolve into familiar forms of deductive and inductive reasoning. Specifically, the final stage is a special type of practical inference which, if correct, is deductively valid, while the creative phase, surprisingly, is not inferential at all. In neither is abduction a type of inference to the best explanation. The result is a major reassessment of the relevance of Peirce's views to contemporary methodological studies. (shrink)

Bilim üzerine yapılan tartışmalar her ne kadar geçmişten beri süregelmekte olsa da modern bilimin gelişimini gösteren bilimsel devrimler, bilim ve bilimsel bilginin ne olduğu tartışmalarını yoğun bir biçimde etkiler. Özellikle bilim hakkında yaygın bir biçimde ifade edilen geleneksel anlayışın temel iddialarından biri, deney bilimlerinin gelişmesine bağlı olarak deneyin de ön plana çıkması nedeniyle, bilimin temelinde saf deney ve gözlemin yer aldığıdır.

Here are some of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine: blood circulation (1620s), vaccination, (1790s), anesthesia (1840s), germ theory (1860s), X- rays (1895), vitamins (early 1900s), antibiotics (1920s-1930s), insulin (1920s), and oncogenes (1970s). This list is highly varied, as it includes basic medical knowledge such has Harvey’s account of how the heart pumps blood, hypotheses about the causes of disease such as the germ theory, ideas about the treatments of diseases such as antibiotics, and medical instruments such (...) as X-ray machines. The philosophy of medicine should be able to contribute to understanding of the nature of discoveries such as these. The great originators of the field of philosophy of science were all concerned with the nature of scientific discovery, including Francis Bacon (1960), William Whewell (1967), John Stuart Mill (1974), and Charles Peirce (1931-1958). The rise of logical positivism in the 1930s pushed discovery off the philosophical agenda, but the topic was revived through the work of philosophers such as Norwood Russell Hanson (1958), Thomas Nickles (1980), Lindley Darden (1991, 2006), and Nancy Nersessian (1984). Scientific discovery has also become an object of investigations for researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, as seen in the work of Herbert Simon, Pat Langley, and others (Langley et al., 1987; Klahr, 2000). Today, scientific September 14, 2009 discovery is an interdisciplinary topic at the intersection of the philosophy, history, and psychology of science. The aim of this chapter is to identify patterns of discovery that illuminate some of the most important developments in the history of medicine. I have used a variety of sources to identify forty great medical discoveries (Adler, 2004; Friedman and Friedland, 1998; Science Channel, 2006; Strauss and Strauss, 2006).. (shrink)

According to C. S. Peirce, abduction is a rational attempt to locate an explanation for a puzzling phenomenon, where this is a process that includes both generating explanatory hypotheses and selecting certain hypotheses for further scrutiny. Since inference is a controlled process that can be subjected to normative standards, essential to his view of abductive rasoning is that it is correlated to a unique species of correctness that cannot be reduced to deductive validity or inductive strength. This irreducibility claim is (...) of considerable importance for the logical and epistemological scrutiny of scientific methods, but it is not clear that Peirce produced a convicing argument for it. To the contrary, when the full structure of abductive argumentation is clarified, especially as presented in Peirce’s later writings on the topic, a good case can be made for viewing every inferential step in the abductive process as dissolving into familiar forms of deductive and inductive reasoning. Specifically, hypothesis-selection is a special type of practical inference that, if correct, is deductively valid, while the creative phase, hypothesis-generation, is not inferential at all. Once this is understood, it emerges that the familiar descriptions of abduction as “inference to the best explanation” or as a process of “belief revision” are, at best, misleading. (shrink)

Despite having put the concept of HPS on the institutional map, N.R. Hanson’s distinctive account of the interdependence between history of science and philosophy of science has been mostly forgotten, and misinterpreted where it is remembered. It is argued that Hanson’s account is worthy of renewed attention and extension since, through its special emphasis on a variety of different normative criteria, it provides the framework for a fruitful and transformative interaction between the two disciplines. This essay also examines two separate (...) threads of Hanson’s account of philosophy of science: his analysis of the conceptual dynamics of science and of the interrelation of the history and philosophy of science. While the two strands appear incongruent, and were perhaps inconsistent, a new interpretation of them is offered which is both consistent with Hanson’s fundamental intuitions and defensible in its own right. It is demonstrated that Hanson’s account compares favorably with those of Kuhn and Lakatos, and that it may provide a constructive means of scaling the barriers erected by fears of the genetic fallacy and ‘whiggish’ history. (shrink)