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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on August 10, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(3):421-450; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi131
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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@oupjournals.org

Predictivism for Pluralists

Eric Christian Barnes

Department of Philosophy Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX 75275–0142 USA ebarnes{at}mail.smu.edu

Predictivism asserts that novel confirmations carry special probative weight. Epistemic pluralism asserts that the judgments of agents (about, e.g., the probabilities of theories) carry epistemic import. In this paper, I propose a new theory of predictivism that is tailored to pluralistic evaluators of theories. I replace the orthodox notion of use-novelty with a notion of endorsement-novelty, and argue that the intuition that predictivism is true has two roots. I provide a detailed Bayesian rendering of this theory and argue that pluralistic theory evaluation pervades scientific practice. I compare my account of predictivism with those of Maher and Worrall.

  1. Introduction
  2. Why construction is a red herring for pluralist evaluators
  3. The unvirtuous accommodator
  4. Virtuous endorsers and the two roots of predictivism
  5. The two roots in Bayesian terms: the priors and background beliefs of endorsers
  6. Who are the pluralist evaluators?
  7. Two contemporary theories of predictivism
    7.1 Maher: Reliable methods of theory construction
    7.2 Worrall: The confirmation of core ideas

  8. Conclusion


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