Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

There is currently no viable alternative to the Bayesian analysis of scientific inference, yet the available versions of Bayesianism fail to do justice to several aspects of the testing and confirmation of scientific hypotheses. Bayes or Bust? provides the first balanced treatment of the complex set of issues involved in this nagging conundrum in the philosophy of science. Both Bayesians and anti-Bayesians will find a wealth of new insights on topics ranging from Bayes’s original paper to contemporary formal learning theory.In (...) a paper published posthumously in 1763, the Reverend Thomas Bayes made a seminal contribution to the understanding of "analogical or inductive reasoning." Building on his insights, modem Bayesians have developed an account of scientific inference that has attracted numerous champions as well as numerous detractors. Earman argues that Bayesianism provides the best hope for a comprehensive and unified account of scientific inference, yet the presently available versions of Bayesianisin fail to do justice to several aspects of the testing and confirming of scientific theories and hypotheses. By focusing on the need for a resolution to this impasse, Earman sharpens the issues on which a resolution turns. John Earman is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. (shrink)

The Description for this book, Theory and Evidence, will be forthcoming.

Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside The Open Society and Its Enemies as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

The Relevance Criterion of confirmation gained prominence as the underlying principle of the class-size approach (CSA) to Hempel's paradoxes of confirmation. The CSA, however, yields counter-intuitive results for (c) instances, and this failing cast serious doubt on the acceptability of the Relevance Criterion. In this paper an attempt is made to rescue the Relevance Criterion from this embarrassment. This is done by incorporating that criterion into a new resolution of the paradoxes, a resolution based on a theory of selective confirmation (...) and a distinction between mere confirmation in principle and evaluative confirmation (E-confirmation). (shrink)

The disagreement of philosophers is notorious. In this book, Rescher develops a theory that accounts for this conflict and shows how the basis for philosophical disagreement roots in divergent 'cognitive values'-values regarding matters such as importance, centrality, and priority. In light of this analysis, Rescher maintains that, despite this inevitable discord, a skeptical or indifferentist reaction to traditional philosophy is not warranted, seeing that genuine value-conflicts are at issue. He argues that philosophy is an important and worthwhile enterprise, notwithstanding its (...) inability to achieve rationally constrained consensus on the issues. Given the nature of the enterprise, consensus is not a realistic goal, and failure to achieve it is not a defect. Accordingly, Rescher argues against the revisionist views proposed by Richard Rorty and Robert Nozick. His discussions are devoted to providing a clear view of why philosophical problems arise and how philosophers address them. (shrink)

This dissertation proposes a new sort of explication of the relation between a hypothesis and the data which test it. Instead of deductive, explanatory, or Bayesian probability relations, qualitative confirmation is explicated in terms of causal relations--E is evidence of H if and only if E is a causal consequence of H. Evidential inferences, according to this confirmation theory, are to be restricted to those licensed by underlying ontic relations. I show how the inferential properties of the causal relation match (...) intuitions about evidential relevance and thereby avoid the paradoxes of confirmation, including the Grue and Raven Paradoxes. This approach meshes with Salmon's ontic theory of scientific explanation, thus providing a unified integration of confirmation and explanation, and revealing the source of the warrant for the "inference to the best explanation" while additionally showing how that theory is incomplete. I also criticize Bayesianism and the hypothetico-deductive method, showing how the causal view's explication of evidential relevance is superior. Applications of this "Hypothetico-CausoInferential Method" are given using several historical scientific examples, including Oldham's discovery of the internal structure of the earth, Darwin's theory of evolution, Einstein's light-quanta hypothesis, and current debate on what killed the dinosaurs. The theory is compared and contrasted with similar views found in Aristotle, Descartes and Miller. It is judged against criteria of adequacy suggested by Hempel and Glymour, and I argue that it provides the best explanation of why controlled experimentation is taken as the hallmark of the scientific method. Finally, a strong version of the theory is considered which holds that in ideal circumstances a particular hypothesis may be confirmed with practical certainty by a single experiment, as Hume suggested. This possible notion of "inductive validity" is based upon a productive necessity-and-sufficiency analysis of causation, which I defend in detail against various objections using a proposed three-place model of the causal relation. (shrink)