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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2004 55(1):1-34; doi:10.1093/bjps/55.1.1
© 2004 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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Prediction Versus Accommodation and the Risk of Overfitting

Christopher Hitchcock1 and Elliott Sober2

1 Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA 91125, USA, cricky{at}caltech.edu 2 Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, California CA94305, USA, esober{at}stanford.edu

When a scientist uses an observation to formulate a theory, it is no surprise that the resulting theory accurately captures that observation. However, when the theory makes a novel prediction—when it predicts an observation that was not used in its formulation—this seems to provide more substantial confirmation of the theory. This paper presents a new approach to the vexed problem of understanding the epistemic difference between prediction and accommodation. In fact, there are several problems that need to be disentangled; in all of them, the key is the concept of overfitting. We float the hypothesis that accommodation is a defective methodology only when the methods used to accommodate the data fail to guard against the risk of overfitting. We connect our analysis with the proposals that other philosophers have made. We also discuss its bearing on the conflict between instrumentalism and scientific realism.

  1. Introduction
  2. Predictivisms—a taxonomy
  3. Observations
  4. Formulating the problem
  5. What might Annie be doing wrong?
  6. Solutions
  7. Observations explained
  8. Mayo on severe tests
  9. The miracle argument and scientific realism
  10. Concluding comments


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