Abstract

A common device in popular presentations of science is a sequence of views from cosmic to terrestrial to local to microscopic, thereby placing the subject to which the program is devoted in a proper perspective. I wish to use an adaptation of this device to place the announced topic of our panel — “Do Explanations or Predictions Provide More Evidential Support for Scientific Theories?” — in perspective. My four steps, from the largest to the smallest scale, are the following:1.A brief summary of the world view suggested by the discoveries of the natural sciences and by philosophical reflections on them;2.a consideration of the methodology for scientific investigation, upon assumption that this world view is approximately correct;3.the formulation of a version of Bayesian scientific inference satisfying the desiderata of step 2;4.the topic of our panel — explanation vs. prediction.