Variety-of-evidence reasoning about the distant past

Variety of Evidence

“…Hence, any addition of a non-negligible amount of probability will make this sum larger than one, i.e., 5 holds. The same is true for the consequences considered in Landes et al (2017); Vezér (2017). There are hence good reasons to think that 5 will hold in most applications in science.…”

“…Eviden-5 It is irrelevant for our discussion whether the hypothesis in question is deterministic or statistical, e.g., '85% of patients treated with drug D recover more quickly than patients not receiving any treatment'. 6 Variety of Evidence reasoning in climate science has recently been analysed to proceed via different consequences of the hypothesis that temperatures are rising, see Vezér (2017). Consequence considered were patterns in temperature profiles in ice, rock and soil as well as the lengths of mountain glaciers and sizes of tree rings.…”

“…The notion of evidential variety has received a range of labels, the reader is referred to(Claveau, 2011, p. 249, Footnote 18). Refer toLloyd (2015);Vezér (2017) for recent Variety of Evidence reasoning in (the rational reconstruction of) climate science.…”

Paleoclimate Proxies and the Benefits of Disunity

“…Philosophers of the historical sciences have often argued that maintaining independent lines of evidence is a useful strategy for historical scientists, exactly because agreement between multiple, independent lines of evidence is prima facie surprising (e.g., Wylie 1989Wylie , 2002Wylie , 2011Cleland 2011Cleland , 2013Forber and Griffith 2011;Currie 2018;Bokulich 2020). 4 Likewise, Martin Vezér (2015Vezér ( , 2017 says it is unlikely that multiple different proxy-based records of past climates would agree about claims if those claims were false; so, he argues, when multiple proxy-based climate reconstructions agree on a particular claim, that claim is more likely to be true than if the claim were only supported by one proxy-based reconstruction. 5 These kinds of arguments that use multiple, independent lines of evidence to support a claim are called consilience arguments, and philosophers of the historical sciences broadly agree that lines of evidence need to be independent (in the right sort of way, whatever that is) to be used in such arguments.…”