Online research in philosophy

Abstract Evidence that supports a theory may be available to the scientist who constructs the theory and used as a guide to that construction, or it may only be discovered in the course of testing the theory. The central claim of this essay is that information about whether the evidence was accommodated or predicted affects the rational degree of confidence one ought to have in the theory. Only when the evidence is accommodated is there some reason to believe that the theoretical system was ?fudged? to fit the evidence in a way that weakens support. This weakening is an objective matter, but not one that can be conclusively determined by examining the contents of the theory and its logical relationship to the evidence. Consequently, there is less reason to believe a theory on the basis of that evidence when it is known that the evidence was accommodated than there would be if it was known instead that the same evidence had been predicted.

In this essay, I use a general argument about the evidential role of data in ongoing inquiry to show that it is fruitful for economic historians and historians of economics to collaborate more frequently. The shared aim of this collaboration should be to learn from past economic experience in order to improve the cutting edge of economic theory. Along the way, I attack a too rigorous distinction between the history of economics and economic history. By drawing on the history of physics, I argue that the history of a discipline can be a source of important evidence in ongoing inquiry. My argument relies on the claim that it is a constitutive element of science that evidence is never discarded forever and is thus historical in nature. In the final section, I offer a case study by explaining a research proposal that turns on a long-running data-set Babylonian whole-sale prices of six commodities noted in pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic times. To motivate my reading of this data-set, I critically discuss Aristotle's successful attempt to distinguish between astrology and political economy.

Basu (2003): For observations to be of use in theory testing, they need to be transformed into evidence via a theoretical process. Evidence is theory-laden.

Discussions of theory-ladenness have traditionally focused on the extent to which observations and observational language are pure, i.e. unaffected by theory, and hence can function as neutral adjudicators in theory testing. By contrast, the purity of theories and of theoretical language is never brought into question. My aim in this paper is to contest this view by arguing that theories and theoretical terms can be afflicted by observation-ladenness.

Kuhn's contribution should be viewed as posing a number of important problems, not as a full-fledged theory of the structure of science. Kuhn's alleged theory-ladenness of observations is examined as a test case in the light of Hintikka's interrogative model of inquiry. A certain superficial theory-ladenness is built into that model. Moreover, the model provides a deeper analysis of theory-ladenness via the two-levelled character of experimental science. A higher-level and a lower-level inquiry rely on different kinds of initial premises and operate with different kinds of "answers" by nature. The model also throws light on the alleged theory-ladenness of meaning.

It is no secret that scientists argue. They argue about theories. But even more, they argue about the evidence for theories. Is the evidence itself trustworthy? This is a bit surprising from the perspective of traditional empiricist accounts of scientific methodology according to which the evidence for scientific theories stems from observation, especially observation with the naked eye. These accounts portray the testing of scientific theories as a matter of comparing the predictions of the theory with the data generated by these observations, which are taken to provide an objective link to reality.

Some twenty years ago, Bogen and Woodward challenged one of the fundamental assumptions of the received view, namely the theory-observation dichotomy and argued for the introduction of the further category of scientific phenomena. The latter, Bogen and Woodward stressed, are usually unobservable and inferred from what is indeed observable, namely scientific data. Crucially, Bogen and Woodward claimed that theories predict and explain phenomena, but not data. But then, of course, the thesis of theory-ladenness, which has it that our observations are influenced by the theories we hold, cannot apply. On the basis of two case studies, I want to show that this consequence of Bogen and Woodward’s account is rather unrealistic. More importantly, I also object against Bogen and Woodward’s view that the reliability of data, which constitutes the precondition for data-to-phenomena inferences, can be secured without the theory one seeks to test. The case studies I revisit have figured heavily in the publications of Bogen and Woodward and others: the discovery of weak neutral currents and the discovery of the zebra pattern of magnetic anomalies. I show that, in the latter case, data can be ignored if they appear to be irrelevant from a particular theoretical perspective (TLI) and that, in the former case, the tested theory can be critical for the assessment of the reliability of the data (TLA). I argue that both TLI and TLA are much stronger senses of theory-ladenness than the classical thesis and that neither TLI nor TLA can be accommodated within Bogen and Woodward’s account.

We use evidence from cognitive psychology and the history of science to examine the issue of the theory-ladenness of perceptual observation. This evidence shows that perception is theory-laden, but that it is only strongly theory-laden when the perceptual evidence is ambiguous or degraded, or when it requires a difficult perceptual judgment. We argue that debates about the theory-ladenness issue have focused too narrowly on the issue of perceptual experience, and that a full account of the scientific process requires an examination of theory-ladenness in attention, perception, data interpretation, data production, memory, and scientific communication. We conclude that the evidence for theory-ladenness does not lead to a relativist account of scientific knowledge.

Jim Bogen and James Woodward’s ‘Saving the Phenomena’, published only twenty years ago, has become a modern classic. Their centrepiece idea is a distinction between data and phenomena. According to them, data are typically the kind of things that are observable or measurable like “bubble chamber photographs, patterns of discharge in electronic particle detectors and records of reaction times and error rates in various psychological experiments” (p. 306). Phenomena are physical processes that are typically unobservable. Examples of the latter category include “weak neutral currents, the decay of the proton, and chunking and recency effects in human memory” (ibid.). Theories, in Bogen and Woodward’s view, are utilised to systematically explain and predict phenomena, not data (pp. 305-306). The relationship between theories and data is rather indirect. Data count as evidence for phenomena and the latter in turn count as evidence for theories. This view has been further elaborated in subsequent papers (see Bogen and Woodward 1992, 2005 and Woodward 1989) and is becoming increasingly influential (e.g. Prajit K. Basu 2003, Stathis Psillos 2004 and Mauricio Suárez 2005). In this paper I argue that in various significant and well-known cases theories accompanied with suitable auxiliary hypotheses are more proximal to observations than Bogen and Woodward would have us believe. This is especially true of cases involving novel predictions.