The central problem with Bayesian philosophy of science is that it cannot take account of the relevance of simplicity and unification to confirmation, induction, and scientific inference. The standard Bayesian folklore about factoring simplicity into the priors, and convergence theorems as a way of grounding their objectivity are some of the myths that Earman's book does not address adequately. 1Review of John Earman: Bayes or Bust?, Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1992, £33.75cloth.

In spite of the fact that the Neyman-Pearson theory of testing is the official theory of statistical testing, most research publications in the social sciences use a pattern of inductive reasoning that is characteristic of Fisherian tests of significance. The exact structure and rationale of this pattern of reasoning is widely misunderstood. The goal of the paper is to describe precisely the pattern and its rationale, and to show that while it is far more cogent than Fisher's critics have realized, (...) it does not logically sustain the inferences it sanctions. (shrink)