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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access published online on July 15, 2008
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, doi:10.1093/bjps/axn017
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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

On the Predilections for Predictions

David Harker

Department of Philosophy, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN 37614, USA harkerd{at}etsu.edu


  Abstract

Scientific theories are developed in response to a certain set of phenomena and subsequently evaluated, at least partially, in terms of the quality of fit between those same theories and appropriately distinctive phenomena. To differentiate between these two stages it is popular to describe the former as involving the accommodation of data and the latter as involving the prediction of data. Predictivism is the view that, ceteris paribus, correctly predicting data confers greater confirmation than successfully accommodating data. In this paper, I take issue with a variety of predictivist theses, argue that their role for issues of confirmation is extremely limited, and attempt to account for the appeal that predictivism has enjoyed.

  1. Introduction
  2. Temporal Predictivism
  3. Heuristic Predictivism
  4. Weak Predictivism
    4.1 Inference to better theories
    4.2 Inference to better methods

  5. 5 Arguments for Strong Heuristic Predictivism
    5.1 Best explanations argument
    5.2 Conditional support
    5.3 Unique explanations

  6. 6 Increased Explanatory Unification
    6.1 Explaining what other theories can't
    6.2 Contrived hypotheses
    6.3 Strength and simplicity

  7. 7 Conclusions


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