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Comment on “The Structure of a Scientific Paper” by Frederick Suppe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Allan Franklin  and
Colin Howson
Allan Franklin*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, University of Colorado
Colin Howson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, London School of Economics
*
†Send reprint requests to the first author, Department of Physics, Campus Box 390, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0390.
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Extract

On the basis of an analysis of a single paper on plate tectonics, a paper whose actual content is nowhere in evidence, Frederick Suppe concludes that no standard model of confirmation—hypothetico-deductive, Bayesian-inductive, or inference to the best explanation—can account for the structure of a scientific paper that reports an experimental result. He further argues on the basis of a survey of scientific papers, a survey whose data and results are also absent, that papers which have a rather stringent length limit, such as the one on plate tectonics, are typical of science. Thus, he concludes that no standard confirmation scheme is capable of dealing with scientific practice. Suppe also requires that an adequate model of philosophical testing should be able to account for everything in such scientific papers, in which space is at a premium.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , September 1998 , pp. 411 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1998

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