作者
Ioannis Votsis, Ludwig Fahrbach, Gerhard Schurz
发表日期
2013/10/30
期刊
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
卷号
45
页码范围
43-45
简介
ie those predictions made by theories that bring about corrections to hitherto accepted empirical results. He maintains that contrapredictions are a particular form of temporally novel predictions. He then proceeds to argue that temporally novel predictions played an important role in the acceptance of the periodic table of elements by the scientific community. Mendeleev’s successful predictions of three new chemical elements (those we cited earlier), Schindler claims, provided additional support for the periodic table only insofar as they demonstrated the approximate truth of the coherence of facts about chemical elements. This coherence is manifested in Mendeleev’s idea that all chemical elements are ordered via the sole criterion of atomic weight. Votsis’ contribution aims to supply foundations for an objective theory of confirmation. He begins the discussion with a challenge some confirmation theorists take seriously: To discover what conditions are needed, other than inferential–semantical ones, for a complete theory of confirmation. Such a theory ought to be able to answer the question whether or not, and if so to what extent, hypotheses constructed post hoc can be confirmed. Votsis claims that predictivism seeks to meet this challenge by making contingent factors, eg the temporal order of evidence and hypotheses, confirmationally relevant. He then goes on to construct a general counter-example to predictivism which purports to show that appeal to contingent factors results in the issuing of conflicting judgments. The upshot is that such factors must be forbidden from playing a role in confirmation. This constitutes the first of four principles …
引用总数
学术搜索中的文章
I Votsis, L Fahrbach, G Schurz - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2013