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60Evidence as Passing Severe Tests: Highly Probable versus Highly Probed HypothesesIn Peter Achinstein (ed.), Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories & Applications, The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 95--128. 2005.
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62The Philosophical Relevance of StatisticsPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980. 1980.While philosophers have studied probability and induction, statistics has not received the kind of philosophical attention mathematics and physics have. Despite increasing use of statistics in science, statistical advances have been little noted in the philosophy of science literature. This paper shows the relevance of statistics to both theoretical and applied problems of philosophy. It begins by discussing the relevance of statistics to the problem of induction and then discusses the reasoning…Read more
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233Behavioristic, evidentialist, and learning models of statistical testingPhilosophy of Science 52 (4): 493-516. 1985.While orthodox (Neyman-Pearson) statistical tests enjoy widespread use in science, the philosophical controversy over their appropriateness for obtaining scientific knowledge remains unresolved. I shall suggest an explanation and a resolution of this controversy. The source of the controversy, I argue, is that orthodox tests are typically interpreted as rules for making optimal decisions as to how to behave--where optimality is measured by the frequency of errors the test would commit in a long …Read more
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384Severe testing as a basic concept in a neyman–pearson philosophy of inductionBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (2): 323-357. 2006.Despite the widespread use of key concepts of the Neyman–Pearson (N–P) statistical paradigm—type I and II errors, significance levels, power, confidence levels—they have been the subject of philosophical controversy and debate for over 60 years. Both current and long-standing problems of N–P tests stem from unclarity and confusion, even among N–P adherents, as to how a test's (pre-data) error probabilities are to be used for (post-data) inductive inference as opposed to inductive behavior. We ar…Read more
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26Principles of inference and their consequencesIn David Corfield & Jon Williamson (eds.), Foundations of Bayesianism, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 381--403. 2001.
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41Learning from error, severe testing, and the growth of theoretical knowledgeIn Deborah G. Mayo & Aris Spanos (eds.), Error and Inference: Recent Exchanges on Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science, Cambridge University Press. pp. 28. 2009.
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330Experimental practice and an error statistical account of evidencePhilosophy of Science 67 (3): 207. 2000.In seeking general accounts of evidence, confirmation, or inference, philosophers have looked to logical relationships between evidence and hypotheses. Such logics of evidential relationship, whether hypothetico-deductive, Bayesian, or instantiationist fail to capture or be relevant to scientific practice. They require information that scientists do not generally have (e.g., an exhaustive set of hypotheses), while lacking slots within which to include considerations to which scientists regularly…Read more
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93Duhem's problem, the bayesian way, and error statistics, or "what's belief got to do with it?"Philosophy of Science 64 (2): 222-244. 1997.I argue that the Bayesian Way of reconstructing Duhem's problem fails to advance a solution to the problem of which of a group of hypotheses ought to be rejected or "blamed" when experiment disagrees with prediction. But scientists do regularly tackle and often enough solve Duhemian problems. When they do, they employ a logic and methodology which may be called error statistics. I discuss the key properties of this approach which enable it to split off the task of testing auxiliary hypotheses fr…Read more
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107The New Experimentalism, Topical Hypotheses, and Learning from ErrorPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994 270-279. 1994.An important theme to have emerged from the new experimentalist movement is that much of actual scientific practice deals not with appraising full-blown theories but with the manifold local tasks required to arrive at data, distinguish fact from artifact, and estimate backgrounds. Still, no program for working out a philosophy of experiment based on this recognition has been demarcated. I suggest why the new experimentalism has come up short, and propose a remedy appealing to the practice of sta…Read more
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38An error in the argument from conditionality and sufficiency to the likelihood principleIn Deborah G. Mayo & Aris Spanos (eds.), Error and Inference: Recent Exchanges on Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science, Cambridge University Press. pp. 305. 2009.
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31Sins of the epistemic probabilist : exchanges with Peter AchinsteinIn Deborah G. Mayo & Aris Spanos (eds.), Error and Inference: Recent Exchanges on Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science, Cambridge University Press. pp. 189. 2009.
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77Novel work on problems of novelty? Comments on HudsonStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 34 (1): 131-134. 2003.
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