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Empirical and Rational Components in Scientific Confirmation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Abner Shimony
Abner Shimony*
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Extract

A common device in popular presentations of science is a sequence of views from cosmic to terrestrial to local to microscopic, thereby placing the subject to which the program is devoted in a proper perspective. I wish to use an adaptation of this device to place the announced topic of our panel — “Do Explanations or Predictions Provide More Evidential Support for Scientific Theories?” — in perspective. My four steps, from the largest to the smallest scale, are the following:

  1. 1. A brief summary of the world view suggested by the discoveries of the natural sciences and by philosophical reflections on them;

  2. 2. a consideration of the methodology for scientific investigation, upon assumption that this world view is approximately correct;

  3. 3. the formulation of a version of Bayesian scientific inference satisfying the desiderata of step 2;

  4. 4. the topic of our panel — explanation vs. prediction.

Type
Part V. Do Explanations or Predictions (or Neither) Provide More Evidential Support for Scientific Theories?
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 146 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, grant no. SBE-9223678.

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