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| Program > Metaphysics |
| Programme > Métaphysique |
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P. Kyle Stanford (University
of California) Selective Confirmation: No Help for Scientific Realism |
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Scientific realists have recently responded to Laudan’s Pessimistic Induction with what I call the selective confirmation strategy: arguing that only the idle parts of genuinely successful past theories have been rejected, while their truly success-generating features have been confirmed by further inquiry. I first argue that existing efforts to apply this strategy suffer from a crucial unrecognized defect, in that one and the same present theory serves both as the standard to which components of a past theory must correspond in order to be judged true and as the background used to decide which of that theory’s components genuinely contributed to its successes. Selective confirmation is therefore unconvincing without some prospectively applicable criterion of idleness that could have been applied by past theorists at the time to identify the idle posits of their theories in advance of future developments (and can now be similarly applied to our own). I go on to argue, however, that existing efforts to address the problem are thoroughly unconvincing: Kitcher’s grounds for regarding the optical/electromagnetic ether as idle or ‘merely presuppositional’ would convict all theoretical posits whatsoever of idleness (including the genes, atoms, molecules and electromagnetic field he hopes to defend as genuinely confirmed by their successes), while Psillos’s proposal that scientists’ own judgments of selective confirmation have turned out to be historically reliable stands refuted by sufficiently detailed consideration of his own central historical examples: optical/electromagnetic ether and caloric fluid. Nor, I suggest, are the avenues for improving on these proposals at all promising.
Department
of Logic and Philosophy of Science
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