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Evidence Enriched

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Abstract

Traditionally, empiricism has relied on the specialness of human observation, yet science is rife with sophisticated instrumentation and techniques. The present article advances a conception of empirical evidence applicable to actual scientific practice. I argue that this conception elucidates how the results of scientific research can be repurposed across diverse epistemic contexts: it helps to make sense of how evidence accumulates across theory change, how different evidence can be amalgamated and used jointly, and how the same evidence can be used to constrain competing theories in the service of breaking local underdetermination.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†.

I am grateful for extensive and constructive feedback on this work from John Norton, Aaron Novick, and David Colaço. In addition, Robert Batterman, James Woodward, Christopher Smeenk, Thomas Pashby, Casey McCoy, Michela Massimi, Matthew Brown, Porter Williams, and Slobodan Perović all deserve my sincere thanks for their advice and for insightful discussions about this piece. I would also like to acknowledge helpful comments from audience members at the University of Pittsburgh History and Philosophy of Science graduate student work in progress talk series, the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice, the work in progress talk series at the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, the London School of Economics Sigma Club, and the 2017 meeting of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science.

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