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Use-Novelty, Severity, and a Systematic Neglect of Relevant Alternatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Tetsuji Iseda
Tetsuji Iseda*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland
*
†Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
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Abstract

This paper analyzes Deborah Mayo's recent criticism of use-novelty requirement. She claims that her severity criterion captures actual scientific practice better than use-novelty, and that use-novelty is not a necessary condition for severity. Even though certain cases in which evidence used for the construction of the hypothesis can test the hypothesis severely, I do not think that her severity criterion fits better with our intuition about good tests than use-novelty. I argue for this by showing a parallelism in terms of severity between the confidence interval case and what she calls ‘gellerization’. To account for the difference between these cases, we need to take into account certain additional considerations like a systematic neglect of relevant alternatives.

Type
Probability and Statistical Inference
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 66 , Issue S3: Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 1999 , 1999 , pp. S403 - S413
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I am very thankful to Professor Mayo for her detailed comments on eariler versions of this paper, and for her patience in replying to my questions. I would also like to thank to faculty members and graduate students at University of Maryland, especially to Rob Skipper and Nancy Hall, for their comments.

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