Novel evidence and severe tests
Philosophy of Science 58 (4):523-552 (1991)
| Abstract | While many philosophers of science have accorded special evidential significance to tests whose results are "novel facts", there continues to be disagreement over both the definition of novelty and why it should matter. The view of novelty favored by Giere, Lakatos, Worrall and many others is that of use-novelty: An accordance between evidence e and hypothesis h provides a genuine test of h only if e is not used in h's construction. I argue that what lies behind the intuition that novelty matters is the deeper intuition that severe tests matter. I set out a criterion of severity akin to the notion of a test's power in Neyman-Pearson statistics. I argue that tests which are use-novel may fail to be severe, and tests that are severe may fail to be use-novel. I discuss the 1919 eclipse data as a severe test of Einstein's law of gravity | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,653 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesRobin Giles (1979). The Concept of a Proposition in Classical and Quantum Physics. Studia Logica 38 (4):337 - 353.
Deborah G. Mayo (2008). How to Discount Double-Counting When It Counts: Some Clarifications. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4):857-879.
Deborah G. Mayo (1992). Did Pearson Reject the Neyman-Pearson Philosophy of Statistics? Synthese 90 (2):233 - 262.
Deborah G. Mayo (1997). Severe Tests, Arguing From Error, and Methodological Underdetermination. Philosophical Studies 86 (3):243-266.
Darrell P. Rowbottom (2008). The Big Test of Corroboration. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (3):293 – 302.
Kent W. Staley (1996). Novelty, Severity, and History in the Testing of Hypotheses: The Case of the Top Quark. Philosophy of Science 63 (3):255.
Deborah G. Mayo (1985). Behavioristic, Evidentialist, and Learning Models of Statistical Testing. Philosophy of Science 52 (4):493-516.
G. R. (2003). Novelty and the 1919 Eclipse Experiments. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B 34 (1):107-129.
Tetsuji Iseda (1999). Use-Novelty, Severity, and a Systematic Neglect of Relevant Alternatives. Philosophy of Science 66 (3):413.
Deborah G. Mayo & Aris Spanos (2006). Severe Testing as a Basic Concept in a Neyman–Pearson Philosophy of Induction. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (2):323-357.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads13 ( #87,816 of 548,984 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,729 of 548,984 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
