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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on November 7, 2008
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2009 60(1):19-49; doi:10.1093/bjps/axn040
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© The Author (2008). 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

The Crux of Crucial Experiments: Duhem's Problems and Inference to the Best Explanation

Marcel Weber

Science Studies Program and Department of Philosophy, University of Basel, Missionsstrasse 21, 4003, Basel, Switzerland

marcel.weber{at}unibas.ch


  Abstract

Going back at least to Duhem, there is a tradition of thinking that crucial experiments are impossible in science. I analyse Duhem's arguments and show that they are based on the excessively strong assumption that only deductive reasoning is permissible in experimental science. This opens the possibility that some principle of inductive inference could provide a sufficient reason for preferring one among a group of hypotheses on the basis of an appropriately controlled experiment. To be sure, there are analogues to Duhem's problems that pertain to inductive inference. Using a famous experiment from the history of molecular biology as an example, I show that an experimentalist version of inference to the best explanation (IBE) does a better job in handling these problems than other accounts of scientific inference. Furthermore, I introduce a concept of experimental mechanism and show that it can guide inferences from data within an IBE-based framework for induction.

  1. Introduction
  2. Duhem on the Logic of Crucial Experiments
  3. ‘The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology’
  4. Why Not Simple Elimination?
  5. Severe Testing
  6. An Experimentalist Version of IBE
    6.1 Physiological and experimental mechanisms
    6.2 Explaining the data
    6.3 IBE and the problem of untested auxiliaries
    6.4 IBE-turtles all the way down

  7. Van Fraassen's ‘Bad Lot’ Argument
  8. IBE and Bayesianism
  9. Conclusions


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