The Crux of Crucial Experiments: Duhem's Problems and Inference to the Best Explanation

Abstract

Going back at least to Duhem, there is a tradition of thinking that crucial experiments are impossible in science. I analyse Duhem's arguments and show that they are based on the excessively strong assumption that only deductive reasoning is permissible in experimental science. This opens the possibility that some principle of inductive inference could provide a sufficient reason for preferring one among a group of hypotheses on the basis of an appropriately controlled experiment. To be sure, there are analogues to Duhem's problems that pertain to inductive inference. Using a famous experiment from the history of molecular biology as an example, I show that an experimentalist version of inference to the best explanation (IBE) does a better job in handling these problems than other accounts of scientific inference. Furthermore, I introduce a concept of experimental mechanism and show that it can guide inferences from data within an IBE-based framework for induction.

Model choice and crucial tests. On the empirical epistemology of the Higgs discovery

“…On the basis of these classical examples from particle physics, we are thus suggesting a notion of crucial experiment that is closer to experimental practice and less dependent on short-term developments in physical theory. This notion seems to us also in the spirit of Weber's (2009) discussion. But we are well aware that a substantive discussion of our proposal would require a broader set of examples, both positive and negative ones.…”

What is a Beautiful Experiment?

“…Another important feature of the Meselson-Stahl experiment is the significance of its results, we often find scientists arguing that the results were 'clean' and 'solid', the experiment is seen to be an exemplar of a crucial experiment, confirming one hypothesis while disconfirming its competitors (Franklin and Laymon (2020), Weber (2019)). Franklin and Laymon (2020) and Holmes (2008) argue that the results are so clear and immediate, there was no need for replication, they spoke conclusively in defence of semi-conservative replication.…”

“…In this paper I adopt a pluralist approach to experiments. 4 Here I focus on how the experiment has been received and praised by scientists and historians, for a detailed analysis of the experiment itself and the inferences drawn from the obtained results, see Bateu (2019), Franklin and Laymon (2020), Holmes (2008) and Weber (2019).…”

Una reivindicación de los experimentos cruciales

“…Dado que la confirmación y la refutación son globales, no pueden distribuirse a las partes componentes de un sistema de hipótesis. 117 23 Para una concepción de los experimentos cruciales en otro marco epistemológico, el de la inferencia a la mejor explicación, véase Weber (2009). 24 La respuesta bayesiana al holismo epistemológico consiste en distribuir los grados de confirmación de manera desigual entre la hipótesis que se quiere contrastar y las hipótesis auxiliares de un sistema.…”