Kent Staley

: Evidence claims depend on fallible assumptions. Three strategies for making true evidence claims in spite of this fallibility are strengthening the support for those assumptions, weakening conclusions, and using multiple independent tests to produce robust evidence. Reliability itself, understood in frequentist terms, does not explain the usefulness of all three strategies; robustness, in particular, sometimes functions in a way that is not well-characterized in terms of reliability. I argue that, in addition to reliability, the security of evidence claims is of epistemic value, where an evidence claim is secure relative to an epistemic situation if it remains true in all scenarios that are epistemically possible relative to that epistemic situation.

I consider the error-statistical account as both a theory of evidence and as a theory of inference. I seek to show how inferences regarding the truth of hypotheses can be upheld by avoiding a certain kind of alternative hypothesis problem. In addition to the testing of assumptions behind the experimental model, I discuss the role of judgments of implausibility. A benefit of my analysis is that it reveals a continuity in the application of error-statistical assessment to low-level empirical hypotheses and highly general theoretical principles. This last point is illustrated with a brief sketch of the issues involved in the parametric framework analysis of tests of physical theories such as General Relativity and of fundamental physical principles such as the Einstein Equivalence Principle.

I contrast two modes of error-elimination relevant to evaluating evidence in accounts that emphasize frequentist reliability. The contrast corresponds to that between the use of of a reliable inference procedure and the critical scrutiny of a procedure with regard to its reliability, in light of what is and is not known about the setting in which the procedure is used. I propose a notion of security as a category of evidential assessment for the latter. In statistical settings, robustness theory and misspecification testing exemplify two distinct strategies for securing statistical inferences.

Evidence claims depend on fallible assumptions. Three strategies for making true evidence claims in spite of this fallibility are strengthening the support for those assumptions, weakening conclusions, and using multiple independent tests to produce robust evidence. Reliability itself, understood in frequentist terms, does not explain the usefulness of all three strategies; robustness, in particular, sometimes functions in a way that is not well-characterized in terms of reliability. I argue that, in addition to reliability, the security of evidence claims is of epistemic value, where an evidence claim is secure relative to an epistemic situation if it remains true in all scenarios that are epistemically possible relative to that epistemic situation.

This paper examines probabilistic versions of the fine-tuning argument for design (FTA), with an emphasis on the interpretation of the probability statements involved in such arguments. Three categories of probability are considered: physical, epistemic, and logical. Of the three possibilities, I argue that only logical probability could possibly support a cogent probabilistic FTA. However, within that framework, the premises of the argument require a level of justification that has not been met, and, it is reasonable to believe, will not be met anytime soon.

: Peter Galison has recently claimed that twentieth-century microphysics has been pursued by two distinct experimental traditions--the image tradition and the logic tradition--that have only recently merged into a hybrid tradition. According to Galison, the two traditions employ fundamentally different forms of experimental argument, with the logic tradition using statistical arguments, while the image tradition strives for non-statistical demonstrations based on compelling ("golden") single events. I show that discoveries in both traditions have employed the same statistical form of argument, even when basing discovery claims on single, golden events. Where Galison sees an epistemic divide between two communities that can only be bridged by a creole- or pidgin-like "interlanguage," there is in fact a shared commitment to a statistical form of experimental argument