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  1. Frequentist Statistics as Internalist Reliabilism.Hanti Lin - manuscript
    There has long been an impression that reliabilism implies externalism and that frequentist statistics is externalist because it is reliabilist. I argue, however, that frequentist statistics can be plausibly understood as a form of internalist reliabilism -- internalist in the conventional sense but reliabilist in certain unconventional yet intriguing ways. More importantly, I develop the thesis that reliabilism does not imply externalism, not by stretching the meaning of 'reliabilism' merely to break the implication, but in order to better understand frequentist (...)
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  • Type I error rates are not usually inflated.Mark Rubin - 2024 - Journal of Trial and Error 1.
    The inflation of Type I error rates is thought to be one of the causes of the replication crisis. Questionable research practices such as p-hacking are thought to inflate Type I error rates above their nominal level, leading to unexpectedly high levels of false positives in the literature and, consequently, unexpectedly low replication rates. In this article, I offer an alternative view. I argue that questionable and other research practices do not usually inflate relevant Type I error rates. I begin (...)
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  • We Have Never Been “New Experimentalists”: On the Rise and Fall of the Turn to Experimentation in the 1980s.Jan Potters & Massimiliano Simons - 2023 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1):91-119.
    The 1980s, it is often claimed, was the decade when experimentation finally became a philosophical topic. This was the responsibility, the claim continues, of one particular movement within philosophy of science, called “new experimentalism.” The aim of this article is to complicate this historical narrative. We argue that in the 1980s, the study of experimentation was carried out not by one movement with one particular aim but rather in a diverse and open-ended way by people with different aims and backgrounds. (...)
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  • The Uniqueness Thesis: A Hybrid Approach.Tamaz Tokhadze - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Sussex
    This dissertation proposes and defends a hybrid view I call Hybrid Impermissivism, which combines the following two theses: Moderate Uniqueness and Credal Permissivism. Moderate Uniqueness says that no evidence could justify both believing a proposition and its negation. However, on Moderate Uniqueness, evidence could justify both believing and suspending judgement on a proposition (hence the adjective “Moderate”). And Credal Permissivism says that more than one credal attitude could be justified on the evidence. Hybrid Impermissisim is developed into a precise theory (...)
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  • Likelihoodism and Guidance for Belief.Tamaz Tokhadze - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (4):501-517.
    Likelihoodism is the view that the degree of evidential support should be analysed and measured in terms of likelihoods alone. The paper considers and responds to a popular criticism that a likelihoodist framework is too restrictive to guide belief. First, I show that the most detailed and rigorous version of this criticism, as put forward by Gandenberger (2016), is unsuccessful. Second, I provide a positive argument that a broadly likelihoodist framework can accommodate guidance for comparative belief, even when objectively well-grounded (...)
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  • (1 other version)When “Replicability” is More than Just “Reliability”: The Hubble Constant Controversy.Vera Matarese & C. D. McCoy - manuscript
    We argue that the epistemic functions of replication in science are best understood by their role in assessing kinds of experimental error. Direct replications serve to assess the reliability of an experiment through its precision: the presence and degree of random error. Conceptual replications serve to assess the validity of an experiment through its accuracy: the presence and degree of systematic errors. To illustrate the aptness of this view, we examine the Hubble constant controversy in astronomy, showing how astronomers have (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Monist Proposal: Against Integrative Pluralism About Protein Structure.Agnes Bolinska - 2022 - Erkenntnis 1 (4).
    Mitchell & Gronenborn propose that we account for the presence of multiple models of protein structure, each produced in different contexts, through the framework of integrative pluralism. I argue that two interpretations of this framework are available, neither of which captures the relationship between a model and the protein structure it represents or between multiple models of protein structure. Further, it inclines us toward concluding prematurely that models of protein structure are right in their contexts and makes extrapolation of findings (...)
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  • Reality in Perspectives.Mahdi Khalili - 2022 - Dissertation, Vu University Amsterdam
    This dissertation is about human knowledge of reality. In particular, it argues that scientific knowledge is bounded by historically available instruments and theories; nevertheless, the use of several independent instruments and theories can provide access to the persistent potentialities of reality. The replicability of scientific observations and experiments allows us to obtain explorable evidence of robust entities and properties. The dissertation includes seven chapters. It also studies three cases – namely, Higgs bosons and hypothetical Ϝ-particles (section 2.4), the Ptolemaic and (...)
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  • Data quality, experimental artifacts, and the reactivity of the psychological subject matter.Uljana Feest - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (1):1-25.
    While the term “reactivity” has come to be associated with specific phenomena in the social sciences, having to do with subjects’ awareness of being studied, this paper takes a broader stance on this concept. I argue that reactivity is a ubiquitous feature of the psychological subject matter and that this fact is a precondition of experimental research, while also posing potential problems for the experimenter. The latter are connected to the worry about distorted data and experimental artifacts. But what are (...)
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  • Framing the Epistemic Schism of Statistical Mechanics.Javier Anta - 2021 - Proceedings of the X Conference of the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science.
    In this talk I present the main results from Anta (2021), namely, that the theoretical division between Boltzmannian and Gibbsian statistical mechanics should be understood as a separation in the epistemic capabilities of this physical discipline. In particular, while from the Boltzmannian framework one can generate powerful explanations of thermal processes by appealing to their microdynamics, from the Gibbsian framework one can predict observable values in a computationally effective way. Finally, I argue that this statistical mechanical schism contradicts the Hempelian (...)
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  • Scientific self-correction: the Bayesian way.Felipe Romero & Jan Sprenger - 2020 - Synthese 198 (S23):5803-5823.
    The enduring replication crisis in many scientific disciplines casts doubt on the ability of science to estimate effect sizes accurately, and in a wider sense, to self-correct its findings and to produce reliable knowledge. We investigate the merits of a particular countermeasure—replacing null hypothesis significance testing with Bayesian inference—in the context of the meta-analytic aggregation of effect sizes. In particular, we elaborate on the advantages of this Bayesian reform proposal under conditions of publication bias and other methodological imperfections that are (...)
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  • Revisiting the two predominant statistical problems: the stopping-rule problem and the catch-all hypothesis problem.Yusaku Ohkubo - 2021 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 30:23-41.
    The history of statistics is filled with many controversies, in which the prime focus has been the difference in the “interpretation of probability” between Fre- quentist and Bayesian theories. Many philosophical arguments have been elabo- rated to examine the problems of both theories based on this dichotomized view of statistics, including the well-known stopping-rule problem and the catch-all hy- pothesis problem. However, there are also several “hybrid” approaches in theory, practice, and philosophical analysis. This poses many fundamental questions. This paper (...)
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  • How to Assess the Epistemic Wrongness of Sponsorship Bias? The Case of Manufactured Certainty.Jon Leefmann - 2021 - Frontiers In 6 (Article 599909):1-13.
    Although the impact of so-called “sponsorship bias” has been the subject of increased attention in the philosophy of science, what exactly constitutes its epistemic wrongness is still debated. In this paper, I will argue that neither evidential accounts nor social–epistemological accounts can fully account for the epistemic wrongness of sponsorship bias, but there are good reasons to prefer social–epistemological to evidential accounts. I will defend this claim by examining how both accounts deal with a paradigm case from medical epistemology, recently (...)
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  • Were experiments ever neglected? Ian Hacking and the history of philosophy of experiment.Massimiliano Simons & Matteo Vagelli - 2021 - Philosophical Inquiries 9 (1):167-188.
    Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening is often credited as being one of the first works to focus on the role of experimentation in philosophy of science, catalyzing a movement which is sometimes called the “philosophy of experiment” or “new experimentalism”. In the 1980s, a number of other movements and scholars also began focusing on the role of experimentation and instruments in science. Philosophical study of experimentation has thus seemed to be an invention of the 1980s whose central figure is Hacking. (...)
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  • Making coherent senses of success in scientific modeling.Beckett Sterner & Christopher DiTeresi - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-20.
    Making sense of why something succeeded or failed is central to scientific practice: it provides an interpretation of what happened, i.e. an hypothesized explanation for the results, that informs scientists’ deliberations over their next steps. In philosophy, the realism debate has dominated the project of making sense of scientists’ success and failure claims, restricting its focus to whether truth or reliability best explain science’s most secure successes. Our aim, in contrast, will be to expand and advance the practice-oriented project sketched (...)
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  • The Problem of New Evidence: P-Hacking and Pre-Analysis Plans.Zoe Hitzig & Jacob Stegenga - 2020 - Diametros 17 (66):10-33.
    We provide a novel articulation of the epistemic peril of p-hacking using three resources from philosophy: predictivism, Bayesian confirmation theory, and model selection theory. We defend a nuanced position on p-hacking: p-hacking is sometimes, but not always, epistemically pernicious. Our argument requires a novel understanding of Bayesianism, since a standard criticism of Bayesian confirmation theory is that it cannot represent the influence of biased methods. We then turn to pre-analysis plans, a methodological device used to mitigate p-hacking. Some say that (...)
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  • Are there Model Behaviours for Model Organism Research? Commentary on Nicole Nelson's Model Behavior.Jacqueline A. Sullivan - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 82:101266.
    One might be inclined to assume, given the mouse donning its cover, that the behavior of interest in Nicole Nelson's book Model Behavior (2018) is that of organisms like mice that are widely used as “stand-ins” for investigating the causes of human behavior. Instead, Nelson's ethnographic study focuses on the strategies adopted by a community of rodent behavioral researchers to identify and respond to epistemic challenges they face in using mice as models to understand the causes of disordered human behaviors (...)
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  • Why computer simulations are not inferences, and in what sense they are experiments.Florian J. Boge - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):1-30.
    The question of where, between theory and experiment, computer simulations (CSs) locate on the methodological map is one of the central questions in the epistemology of simulation (cf. Saam Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 48, 293–309, 2017). The two extremes on the map have them either be a kind of experiment in their own right (e.g. Barberousse et al. Synthese, 169, 557–574, 2009; Morgan 2002, 2003, Journal of Economic Methodology, 12(2), 317–329, 2005; Morrison Philosophical Studies, 143, 33–57, 2009; Morrison (...)
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  • The Costs of HARKing.Mark Rubin - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (2):535-560.
    Kerr coined the term ‘HARKing’ to refer to the practice of ‘hypothesizing after the results are known’. This questionable research practice has received increased attention in recent years because it is thought to have contributed to low replication rates in science. The present article discusses the concept of HARKing from a philosophical standpoint and then undertakes a critical review of Kerr’s twelve potential costs of HARKing. It is argued that these potential costs are either misconceived, misattributed to HARKing, lacking evidence, (...)
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  • Integrative pluralism for biological function.Beckett Sterner & Samuel Cusimano - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):1-21.
    We introduce a new type of pluralism about biological function that, in contrast to existing, demonstrates a practical integration among the term’s different meanings. In particular, we show how to generalize Sandra Mitchell’s notion of integrative pluralism to circumstances where multiple epistemic tools of the same type are jointly necessary to solve scientific problems. We argue that the multiple definitions of biological function operate jointly in this way based on how biologists explain the evolution of protein function. To clarify how (...)
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  • La valeur de l'incertitude : l'évaluation de la précision des mesures physiques et les limites de la connaissance expérimentale.Fabien Grégis - 2016 - Dissertation, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité Université Paris.Diderot (Paris 7)
    Abstract : A measurement result is never absolutely accurate: it is affected by an unknown “measurement error” which characterizes the discrepancy between the obtained value and the “true value” of the quantity intended to be measured. As a consequence, to be acceptable a measurement result cannot take the form of a unique numerical value, but has to be accompanied by an indication of its “measurement uncertainty”, which enunciates a state of doubt. What, though, is the value of measurement uncertainty? What (...)
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  • How to Do Things with Theory: The Instrumental Role of Auxiliary Hypotheses in Testing.Corey Dethier - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (6):1453-1468.
    Pierre Duhem’s influential argument for holism relies on a view of the role that background theory plays in testing: according to this still common account of “auxiliary hypotheses,” elements of background theory serve as truth-apt premises in arguments for or against a hypothesis. I argue that this view is mistaken. Rather than serving as truth-apt premises in arguments, auxiliary hypotheses are employed as “epistemic tools”: instruments that perform specific tasks in connecting our theoretical questions with the world but that are (...)
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  • Stopping rules as experimental design.Samuel C. Fletcher - 2019 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (2):1-20.
    A “stopping rule” in a sequential experiment is a rule or procedure for deciding when that experiment should end. Accordingly, the “stopping rule principle” states that, in a sequential experiment, the evidential relationship between the final data and an hypothesis under consideration does not depend on the experiment’s stopping rule: the same data should yield the same evidence, regardless of which stopping rule was used. In this essay, I reconstruct and rebut five independent arguments for the SRP. Reminding oneself that (...)
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  • Productive theory-ladenness in fMRI.M. Emrah Aktunc - 2019 - Synthese 198 (9):7987-8003.
    Several developments for diverse scientific goals, mostly in physics and physiology, had to take place, which eventually gave us fMRI as one of the central research paradigms of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. This technique stands on solid foundations established by the physics of magnetic resonance and the physiology of hemodynamics and is complimented by computational and statistical techniques. I argue, and support using concrete examples, that these foundations give rise to a productive theory-ladenness in fMRI, which enables researchers to identify and (...)
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  • Productive Theory-Ladenness in fMRI.Emrah Aktunc - forthcoming - Synthese.
    Several developments for diverse scientific goals, mostly in physics and physiology, had to take place, which eventually gave us fMRI as one of the central research paradigms of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. This technique stands on solid foundations established by the physics of magnetic resonance and the physiology of hemodynamics and is complimented by computational and statistical techniques. I argue, and support using concrete examples, that these foundations give rise to a productive theory-ladenness in fMRI, which enables researchers to identify and (...)
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  • Kuhn’s two accounts of rational disagreement in science: an interpretation and critique.Markus Seidel - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 25):6023-6051.
    Whereas there is much discussion about Thomas Kuhn’s notion of methodological incommensurability and many have seen his ideas as an attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science, so far no serious analysis of how exactly Kuhn aims to account for rational disagreement has been proposed. This paper provides the first in-depth analysis of Kuhn’s account of rational disagreement in science—an account that can be seen as the most prominent attempt to allow for rational disagreement in science. Three things will (...)
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  • Counting experiments.Jonathan Livengood - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 176 (1):175-195.
    In this paper, I show how one might resist two influential arguments for the Likelihood Principle by appealing to the ontological significance of creative intentions. The first argument for the Likelihood Principle that I consider is the argument from intentions. After clarifying the argument, I show how the key premiss in the argument may be resisted by maintaining that creative intentions sometimes independently matter to what experiments exist. The second argument that I consider is Gandenberger’s :475–503, 2015) rehabilitation of Birnbaum’s (...)
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  • Statistical Inference and the Replication Crisis.Lincoln J. Colling & Dénes Szűcs - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1):121-147.
    The replication crisis has prompted many to call for statistical reform within the psychological sciences. Here we examine issues within Frequentist statistics that may have led to the replication crisis, and we examine the alternative—Bayesian statistics—that many have suggested as a replacement. The Frequentist approach and the Bayesian approach offer radically different perspectives on evidence and inference with the Frequentist approach prioritising error control and the Bayesian approach offering a formal method for quantifying the relative strength of evidence for hypotheses. (...)
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  • Why Replication is Overrated.Uljana Feest - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):895-905.
    Current debates about the replication crisis in psychology take it for granted that direct replication is valuable and focus their attention on questionable research practices in regard to statistical analyses. This paper takes a broader look at the notion of replication as such. It is argued that all experimentation/replication involves individuation judgments and that research in experimental psychology frequently turns on probing the adequacy of such judgments. In this vein, I highlight the ubiquity of conceptual and material questions in research, (...)
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  • Psa 2018.Philsci-Archive -Preprint Volume- - unknown
    These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2018.
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  • Computer Simulations in Science and Engineering. Concept, Practices, Perspectives.Juan Manuel Durán - 2018 - Springer.
    This book addresses key conceptual issues relating to the modern scientific and engineering use of computer simulations. It analyses a broad set of questions, from the nature of computer simulations to their epistemological power, including the many scientific, social and ethics implications of using computer simulations. The book is written in an easily accessible narrative, one that weaves together philosophical questions and scientific technicalities. It will thus appeal equally to all academic scientists, engineers, and researchers in industry interested in questions (...)
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  • Sobre la historia de la filosofía de la ciencia. A propósito de un libro de C. Ulises Moulines.Alejandro Cassini - 2013 - Critica 45 (134):69-97.
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  • Manipulating the Alpha Level Cannot Cure Significance Testing.David Trafimow, Valentin Amrhein, Corson N. Areshenkoff, Carlos J. Barrera-Causil, Eric J. Beh, Yusuf K. Bilgiç, Roser Bono, Michael T. Bradley, William M. Briggs, Héctor A. Cepeda-Freyre, Sergio E. Chaigneau, Daniel R. Ciocca, Juan C. Correa, Denis Cousineau, Michiel R. de Boer, Subhra S. Dhar, Igor Dolgov, Juana Gómez-Benito, Marian Grendar, James W. Grice, Martin E. Guerrero-Gimenez, Andrés Gutiérrez, Tania B. Huedo-Medina, Klaus Jaffe, Armina Janyan, Ali Karimnezhad, Fränzi Korner-Nievergelt, Koji Kosugi, Martin Lachmair, Rubén D. Ledesma, Roberto Limongi, Marco T. Liuzza, Rosaria Lombardo, Michael J. Marks, Gunther Meinlschmidt, Ladislas Nalborczyk, Hung T. Nguyen, Raydonal Ospina, Jose D. Perezgonzalez, Roland Pfister, Juan J. Rahona, David A. Rodríguez-Medina, Xavier Romão, Susana Ruiz-Fernández, Isabel Suarez, Marion Tegethoff, Mauricio Tejo, Rens van de Schoot, Ivan I. Vankov, Santiago Velasco-Forero, Tonghui Wang, Yuki Yamada, Felipe C. M. Zoppino & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
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  • The objectivity of Subjective Bayesianism.Jan Sprenger - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):539-558.
    Subjective Bayesianism is a major school of uncertain reasoning and statistical inference. It is often criticized for a lack of objectivity: it opens the door to the influence of values and biases, evidence judgments can vary substantially between scientists, it is not suited for informing policy decisions. My paper rebuts these concerns by connecting the debates on scientific objectivity and statistical method. First, I show that the above concerns arise equally for standard frequentist inference with null hypothesis significance tests. Second, (...)
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  • (1 other version)What's Wrong With Our Theories of Evidence?Julian Reiss - 2014 - Theoria 29 (2):283-306.
    This paper reviews all major theories of evidence such as the Bayesian theory, hypothetico-deductivism, satisfaction theories, error-statistics, Achinstein's explanationist theory and Cartwright's argument theory. All these theories fail to take adequate account of the context in which a hypothesis is established and used. It is argued that the context of an inquiry determines important facts about what evidence is, and how much and what kind has to be collected to establish a hypothesis for a given purpose.
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  • On the Possibility of Crucial Experiments in Biology.Tudor Baetu - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (2):407-429.
    The article analyses in detail the Meselson–Stahl experiment, identifying two novel difficulties for the crucial experiment account, namely, the fragility of the experimental results and the fact that the hypotheses under scrutiny were not mutually exclusive. The crucial experiment account is rejected in favour of an experimental-mechanistic account of the historical significance of the experiment, emphasizing that the experiment generated data about the biochemistry of DNA replication that is independent of the testing of the semi-conservative, conservative, and dispersive hypotheses. _1_ (...)
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  • Non-Bayesian Accounts of Evidence: Howson’s Counterexample Countered.Gordon Brittan, Mark L. Taper & Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay - 2016 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (3):291-298.
    There is a debate in Bayesian confirmation theory between subjective and non-subjective accounts of evidence. Colin Howson has provided a counterexample to our non-subjective account of evidence: the counterexample refers to a case in which there is strong evidence for a hypothesis, but the hypothesis is highly implausible. In this article, we contend that, by supposing that strong evidence for a hypothesis makes the hypothesis more believable, Howson conflates the distinction between confirmation and evidence. We demonstrate that Howson’s counterexample fails (...)
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  • Was regression to the mean really the solution to Darwin’s problem with heredity?: Essay Review of Stigler, Stephen M. 2016. The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. [REVIEW]Adam Krashniak & Ehud Lamm - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy (5):1-10.
    Statistical reasoning is an integral part of modern scientific practice. In The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom Stephen Stigler presents seven core ideas, or pillars, of statistical thinking and the historical developments of each of these pillars, many of which were concurrent with developments in biology. Here we focus on Stigler’s fifth pillar, regression, and his discussion of how regression to the mean came to be thought of as a solution to a challenge for the theory of natural selection. Stigler (...)
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  • Evidential holism.Joe Morrison - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (6):e12417.
    Evidential holism begins with something like the claim that “it is only jointly as a theory that scientific statements imply their observable consequences.” This is the holistic claim that Elliott Sober tells us is an “unexceptional observation”. But variations on this “unexceptional” claim feature as a premise in a series of controversial arguments for radical conclusions, such as that there is no analytic or synthetic distinction that the meaning of a sentence cannot be understood without understanding the whole language of (...)
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  • Philosophical Commitments, Empirical Evidence, and Theoretical Psychology.Allen Pamela - 2015 - Theory and Psychology 25 (1):03-24.
    The philosophical or theoretical commitments informing psychological research are sometimes characterized, even by theoretical psychologists themselves, as nonempirical, outside the bounds of methodological consideration, and/or nonrational. We argue that this characterization is incoherent. We illustrate our concern by analogy with problematic appeals to Kuhn’s work that have been influential in theoretical psychology. Following the contemporary pragmatist tradition, we argue that our philosophical/theoretical commitments are part of our larger webs of belief, and that for any of these beliefs to have meaning (...)
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  • Simplicity, Inference and Modelling: Keeping It Sophisticatedly Simple.Arnold Zellner, Hugo A. Keuzenkamp & Michael McAleer (eds.) - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity (...)
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  • (1 other version)Computer models and the evidence of anthropogenic climate change: An epistemology of variety-of-evidence inferences and robustness analysis.Martin Vezer - 2016 - Computer Models and the Evidence of Anthropogenic Climate Change: An Epistemology of Variety-of-Evidence Inferences and Robustness Analysis MA Vezér Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 56:95-102.
    To study climate change, scientists employ computer models, which approximate target systems with various levels of skill. Given the imperfection of climate models, how do scientists use simulations to generate knowledge about the causes of observed climate change? Addressing a similar question in the context of biological modelling, Levins (1966) proposed an account grounded in robustness analysis. Recent philosophical discussions dispute the confirmatory power of robustness, raising the question of how the results of computer modelling studies contribute to the body (...)
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  • (1 other version)II—Wendy S. Parker: Confirmation and adequacy-for-Purpose in Climate Modelling.Wendy S. Parker - 2009 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 83 (1):233-249.
    Lloyd (2009) contends that climate models are confirmed by various instances of fit between their output and observational data. The present paper argues that what these instances of fit might confirm are not climate models themselves, but rather hypotheses about the adequacy of climate models for particular purposes. This required shift in thinking—from confirming climate models to confirming their adequacy-for-purpose—may sound trivial, but it is shown to complicate the evaluation of climate models considerably, both in principle and in practice.
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  • Using Bayes to get the most out of non-significant results.Zoltan Dienes - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5:85883.
    No scientific conclusion follows automatically from a statistically non-significant result, yet people routinely use non-significant results to guide conclusions about the status of theories (or the effectiveness of practices). To know whether a non-significant result counts against a theory, or if it just indicates data insensitivity, researchers must use one of: power, intervals (such as confidence or credibility intervals), or else an indicator of the relative evidence for one theory over another, such as a Bayes factor. I argue Bayes factors (...)
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  • Expanding Our Grasp: Causal Knowledge and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives.Matthias Egg - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (1):115-141.
    I argue that scientific realism, insofar as it is only committed to those scientific posits of which we have causal knowledge, is immune to Kyle Stanford’s argument from unconceived alternatives. This causal strategy is shown not to repeat the shortcomings of previous realist responses to Stanford’s argument. Furthermore, I show that the notion of causal knowledge underlying it can be made sufficiently precise by means of conceptual tools recently introduced into the debate on scientific realism. Finally, I apply this strategy (...)
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  • Copernicus, Kant, and the anthropic cosmological principles.Sherrilyn Roush - 2003 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 34 (1):5-35.
    In the last three decades several cosmological principles and styles of reasoning termed 'anthropic' have been introduced into physics research and popular accounts of the universe and human beings' place in it. I discuss the circumstances of 'fine tuning' that have motivated this development, and what is common among the principles. I examine the two primary principles, and find a sharp difference between these 'Weak' and 'Strong' varieties: contrary to the view of the progenitors that all anthropic principles represent a (...)
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  • Model structure adequacy analysis: selecting models on the basis of their ability to answer scientific questions.Mark L. Taper, David F. Staples & Bradley B. Shepard - 2008 - Synthese 163 (3):357-370.
    Models carry the meaning of science. This puts a tremendous burden on the process of model selection. In general practice, models are selected on the basis of their relative goodness of fit to data penalized by model complexity. However, this may not be the most effective approach for selecting models to answer a specific scientific question because model fit is sensitive to all aspects of a model, not just those relevant to the question. Model Structural Adequacy analysis is proposed as (...)
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  • Experimental Series and the Justification of Temin’s DNA Provirus Hypothesis.James A. Marcum - 2007 - Synthese 154 (2):259-292.
    A notion of experimental series is developed, in which experiments or experimental sets are connected through experimental suggestions arising from previous experimental outcomes. To that end, the justification of Howard Temin's DNA provirus hypothesis is examined. The hypothesis originated with evidence from two exploratory experimental sets on an oncogenic virus and was substantiated by including evidence from three additional experimental sets. Collectively these sets comprise an experimental series and the accumulative evidence from the series was adequate to justify the hypothesis (...)
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  • Historical Inductions: New Cherries, Same Old Cherry-picking.Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (2):129-148.
    In this article, I argue that arguments from the history of science against scientific realism, like the arguments advanced by P. Kyle Stanford and Peter Vickers, are fallacious. The so-called Old Induction, like Vickers's, and New Induction, like Stanford's, are both guilty of confirmation bias—specifically, of cherry-picking evidence that allegedly challenges scientific realism while ignoring evidence to the contrary. I also show that the historical episodes that Stanford adduces in support of his New Induction are indeterminate between a pessimistic and (...)
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  • Robustness Analysis as Explanatory Reasoning.Jonah N. Schupbach - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (1):275-300.
    When scientists seek further confirmation of their results, they often attempt to duplicate the results using diverse means. To the extent that they are successful in doing so, their results are said to be robust. This paper investigates the logic of such "robustness analysis" [RA]. The most important and challenging question an account of RA can answer is what sense of evidential diversity is involved in RAs. I argue that prevailing formal explications of such diversity are unsatisfactory. I propose a (...)
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