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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on October 31, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):791-807; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi146
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© The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Scientific Coherence and the Fusion of Experimental Results

David Danks

Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University and Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA ddanks{at}cmu.edu

A pervasive feature of the sciences, particularly the applied sciences, is an experimental focus on a few (often only one) possible causal connections. At the same time, scientists often advance and apply relatively broad models that incorporate many different causal mechanisms. We are naturally led to ask whether there are normative rules for integrating multiple local experimental conclusions into models covering many additional variables. In this paper, we provide a positive answer to this question by developing several inference rules that use local causal models to place constraints on the integrated model, given quite general assumptions. We also demonstrate the practical value of these rules by applying them to a case study from ecology.

  1. Experimental scope in applied sciences
  2. Fusing the results of experiments
  3. A concrete example of the inference rules
  4. Application to a case study


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D. Steel
With or Without Mechanisms: A Reply to Weber
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, September 1, 2007; 37(3): 360 - 365.
[Abstract] [PDF]


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