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Error Statistics and Duhem's Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Gregory R. Wheeler
Gregory R. Wheeler*
Affiliation:
Departments of Philosophy and Computer Science, University of Rochester
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, 534 Lattimore Hall, Rochester NY 14627; email: wheeler@philosophy.rochester.edu.
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Abstract

No one has a well developed solution to Duhem's problem, the problem of how experimental evidence warrants revision of our theories. Deborah Mayo proposes a solution to Duhem's problem in route to her more ambitious program of providing a philosophical account of inductive inference and experimental knowledge. This paper is a response to Mayo's Error Statistics (ES) program, paying particular attention to her response to Duhem's problem. It turns out that Mayo's purported solution to Duhem's problem is very significant to her project, for the epistemic license claimed by ES and the philosophical underpinnings to her account of experimental knowledge depend on this solution. By introducing the partition problem, I argue that ES fails to solve Duhem's problem and therefore fails to provide an adequate account of experimental knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , September 2000 , pp. 410 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Previous versions of this paper were presented at Cornell University, University of Rochester, M.I.T., and University of Lethbridge. The author wishes to thank Prasanta Bandypadhyay, Earl Conee, Heidi Dankosh, Joe Halpern, Deborah Mayo, and especially Henry Kyburg and an anonymous referee for their comments.

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