The Logic of Success

The problem of induction reminds us that science cannot wait for empirical hypotheses to be verified and Duhem's problem reminds us that we cannot expect full refutations either. We must settle for something less. The shape of this something less depends on which features of full verification and refutation we choose to emphasize. If we conceive of verification and refutation as arguments in which evidence entails the hypothesis or its negation, then the central problem of the philosophy of science is to explicate a relation of confirmation or support that is weaker than full entailment but which serves, nonetheless, to justify empirical conclusions. Much standard philosophy of science follows from this simple conception. Justification is a state that obtains when the confirmation relation holds. The precise nature of confirmation is hazy, but it can be explicated from historical examples. Confirmation, like entailment, is a universal concept. Context-dependencies can be absorbed into the relation so long as sufficient intersubjective force remains to ground scientific forms of argument. Underdetermination is a matter of evidential support. The realism debate can therefore be settled by showing that one theory is better confirmed than another (Glymour 1981, Friedman 1983). Since confirmation confers justification, it philosophically " screens off " all other considerations. Thus, discovery and computability are irrelevant to epistemology (Laudan 1980) and should be referred to appropriate experts in mathematics, psychology and computer science. The only remaining role for mathematical logic is to help us reason about the nature of the explicated confirmation relation. So if there were no underlying relation of justification to be studied, there would be no logic of science. I will refer to this familiar viewpoint as the relational paradigm. The relational paradigm is natural and resilient. Successive contextualizations and liberalizations lead all the way from naïve hypothetico-deductivism, verificationism and falsificationism to the Bayesian synthesis and recent historicist 1 I would like to thank Clark Glymour and Oliver Schulte for valuable and timely comments on drafts of this paper. Some of these ideas were presented to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Indiana in the Spring of 1999. The paper also benefited from comments by John Earman and Jim Lennox after a presentation at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in the Spring of 2000. 2 meta-methodologies in which research traditions, rather than hypotheses or theories are the proper objects of justification. But …