Denying the antecedent is an invalid form of reasoning that is typically identified and frowned upon as a formal fallacy. Contrary to arguments that it does not or at least should not occur, denying the antecedent is a legitimate and effective strategy for undermining a position. Since it is not a valid form of argument, it cannot prove that the position is false. But it can provide inductive evidence that this position is probably false. In this role, it is neither (...) defective nor deceptive. Denying the antecedent provides inductive support for rejecting a claim as improbable. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn has argued that scientists never reject a paradigm without simultaneously accepting a new paradigm. Coupled with Kuhn's claim that it is paradigms as a whole, and not individual theories, that are accepted or rejected, this thesis is seen as one of Kuhn's main challenges to the rationality of science. I argue that Kuhn is mistaken in this claim; at least in some instances, science rejects a paradigm despite the absence of a successor. In particular, such a description best (...) fits Kuhn's most discussed example, the Copernican Revolution. By differentiating scientific discoveries into three types, spontaneous, implicit, and directed, we see that Kuhn's thesis holds for spontaneous and implicit discoveries, but not directed discoveries. Directed discoveries must be understood by an alternative account of falsifiability, based on argument by reductio ad absurdum rather than argument by modus tollens as traditional accounts of falsifiability would have it. (shrink)

Contemporary arguments for scientific realism are typically based on some form of inference to the best explanation. Sometimes such arguments concern the methods of science: given the success of scientific methodology, realism offers the best explanation of this success. Sometimes such arguments concern the content of scientific theories: given observed regularities in nature, explanations must be given of those regularities; the best such explanations will be realist. One forceful explanationist argument about the content of science can be based on Hans (...) Reichenbach’s Principle of the Common Cause. Roughly, CC says that whenever an enduring correlation between two events is observed, there must be some preceding event which is the common cause of the two, and is the explanation for the correlation. Rigid adherence to this demand for a common cause, however, supposedly goes beyond the instrumentalist explanatory resources available to the antirealist, and hence CC is taken to be a sufficient condition for realism. Further, one might claim that any argument that realism has greater explanatory power than antirealism depends either explicitly or implicitly on CC, and hence CC is also a necessary condition for realism. (shrink)