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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access published online on August 10, 2005
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 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

Article

Predictivism for Pluralists

Eric Christian Barnes 1*

1 Department of Philosophy, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275-0142, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Eric Christian Barnes, E-mail: ebarnes{at}mail.smu.edu


  Abstract

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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