Tag Archives: Theory of Science & Methodology

When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long familiar before any value has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems. In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the...

Foucault’s cryptonormative approach — a critique I always found Foucault’s work frustrating to read. His empirical accounts are interesting and some of his concepts fruitful – disciplinary power, capillary power, surveillance, technologies of the self, the entrepreneur of the self, for example – and he was prescient about neoliberalism, but his theoretical reasoning is often confused. His attempts to define power, and his unacknowledged slippage between...

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The Holy Grail of Science Traditionally, philosophers have focused mostly on the logical template of inference. The paradigm-case has been deductive inference, which is topic-neutral and context-insensitive. The study of deductive rules has engendered the search for the Holy Grail: syntactic and topic-neutral accounts of all prima facie reasonable inferential rules. The search has hoped to find rules that are transparent and algorithmic, and whose following...

Statistical philosophies and idealizations As has been long and widely emphasized in various terms … frequentism and Bayesianism are incomplete both as learning theories and as philosophies of statistics, in the pragmatic sense that each alone are insufficient for all sound applications. Notably, causal justifications are the foundation for classical frequentism, which demands that all model constraints be deduced from real mechanical constraints on the...

The bias toward the superficial and the response to extraneous influences on research are both examples of real harm done in contemporary social science by a roughly Bayesian paradigm of statistical inference as the epitome of empirical argument. For instance the dominant attitude toward the sources of black-white differential in United States unemployment rates (routinely the rates are in a two to one ratio) is “phenomenological.” The employment differences are traced to...

Scientific realism and inference to the best explanation In inference to the best explanation we start with a body of (purported) data/facts/evidence and search for explanations that can account for these data/facts/evidence. Having the best explanation means that you, given the context-dependent background assumptions, have a satisfactory explanation that can explain the fact/evidence better than any other competing explanation — and so it is reasonable to...

Why Bayesianism doesn’t resolve scientific disputes The occurrence of unknown prior probabilities, that must be stipulated arbitrarily, does not worry the Bayesian anymore than God’s inscrutable designs worry the theologian. Thus Lindley (1976), one of the leaders of the Bayesian school, holds that this difficulty has been ‘grossly exaggerated’. And he adds: ‘I am often asked if the [Bayesian] method gives the right answer: or, more particularly, how do you...

Although Bayes’ theorem is mathematically unquestionable, that doesn’t qualify it as indisputably applicable to scientific questions. Science is not reducible to betting, and scientific inference is not a branch of probability theory. It always transcends mathematics. The unfulfilled dream of constructing an inductive logic of probabilism — the Bayesian Holy Grail — will always remain unfulfilled. Bayesian probability calculus is far from the automatic inference engine that...

Bayesianism — the new positivism No matter how atheoretical their inclination, scientists are interested in relations between properties of phenomena, not in lists of readings from dials of instruments that detect those properties … Here as elsewhere, Bayesian philosophy of science obscures a difference between scientists’ problems of hypothesis choice and the problems of prediction that are the standard illustrations and applications of probability theory....