Error and Inference: Recent Exchanges on Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science

摘要

When do data provide good evidence for a hypothesis, evidence that warrants anninference to the hypothesis? Standard answers either reject the legitimacy of inductionnor else allow warranted inference from data to hypothesis when there are suitablenrelationships between and among the data and hypotheses. The severity account re-njects all of these, maintaining instead that the good evidence relation concerns notnonly relations between data and hypotheses but also the methods for obtaining thendata and the sensitivity of these methods to detecting falsehood. So, for example,nthe severity account allows two rival hypotheses to fit the data equally well, evennto the point of having the same prior and posterior probabilities relative to those data,nwhile the data nonetheless favour one hypothesis over the other by virtue of thosendata providing a severe test of one hypothesis and not the other.