Abstract

Can statistical inference shed any worthwhile light on theory change? For many years I have believed that the answer is “Yes.” Let me try to explain why I think so. On my first reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) I was so deeply shocked at his repudiation of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification that I put the book down without finishing it. By 1969, when a conference was held at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science on the relations between the history of science and the philosophy of science, I had returned to Structure and formed the view that Kuhn’s rejection of this fundamental distinction resulted from his adoption of an inadequate conception of scientific justification. It appeared that he saw scientific confirmation in terms of the traditional hypothetico-deductive (H-D) schema, according to which a scientific hypothesis (or theory) is confirmed by observing the truth of its logical consequences.