The instrumentalist abduction task and the nature of empirical counterexamples: Reply to Atocha Aliseda

Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1):190-192 (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This paper primarily deals with the conceptual prospects for generalizing the aim of abduction from the standard one of explaining surprising or anomalous observations to that of empirical progress or even truth approximation. It turns out that the main abduction task then becomes the instrumentalist task of theory revision aiming at an empirically more successful theory, relative to the available data, but not necessarily compatible with them. The rest, that is, genuine empirical progress as well as observational, referential and theoretical truth approximation, is a matter of evaluation and selection, and possibly new generation tasks for further improvement. The paper concludes with a survey of possible points of departure, in AI and logic, for computational treatment of the instrumentalist task guided by the ‘comparative evaluation matrix’

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Toward a geometrical theory of truth approximation: Reply to Thomas Mormann.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1):455-457.
Lacunae, empirical progress and semantic tableaux.Atocha Aliseda - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1):169-189.
Another start for abduction aiming at empirical progress: Reply to joke Meheus.Theo A. F. Kuipers - 2005 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1):218-220.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
95 (#165,937)

6 months
1 (#1,027,696)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Citations of this work

La falsación empírica y los problemas lacunae.Damian Islas - 2014 - Revista de Filosofía (Costa Rica) (137):33-41.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references