More on Deborah Mayo

I have mentioned Mayo and her book, STATISTICAL INFERENCE AND SEVERE TESTING before. Here I come back to it to provide you with some fruits of my readings therein.

Duhem's problem. Pierre Duhem said that experimental falsification doesn't get us very far in physics because the error that explains the surprising experimental result could invariably have come from any of a number of related postulates. The surprising result only tells us that ONE of them is wrong.

"The only thing the experiment teaches us is ... there is at least one error; but, where this error lies is just what it does not tell us." [a 1954 book.]

Quine said much the same, though he didn't think the idea restricted to physics.

Popper replied, in CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS (1962). "We can be reasonably successful in attributing our refutations to definite portions of the theoretical maze. (For we are reasonably successful in this -- a fact which remains inexplicable for one who adopts Duhem's and Quine's view of the matter.)"

Mayo takes Popper's side here, with an important qualification. Interestingly, she names some probability statisticians who were "ahead of Popper," and on that list is one of the classic American pragmatists, Charles Peirce. She gives nothing specific justifying the Peirce reference here, though there are -- says the index -- going to be some later mentions of Peirce.

Here is Mayo's qualification.

"Popper talked of wanting to subject theories to grave risk of falsification. I suggest that it's really our inquiries into, or tests of, the theories that we want to subject to grave risk. The onus is on interpreters of data to show they are countering the charge of a poorly run test. I admit this is a modification of Popper. One could reframe the entire demarcation problem as one of the characters of an inquiry or test."

In other words, she wants to go "meta" on the concept of falsification. Take an astrologer's hypothesis, "A Libra is more likely to become a successful investor than a Gemini." It is possible we could specify that statement with enough precision to make it falsifiable by proper statistical evidence. It is, though, not especially plausible to think that astrology becomes a science rather than a pseudo-science by allowing for that possibility.

A better inquiry: do astrologers routinely DO rigorous statistical inquiries into the truth of such statements? If so, then one astrologer might say to another, perhaps through the medium of a peer-reviewed journal, "your numbers on the Libra/Gemini investment disparity represent too small a data set. I have expanded the data set and obtained different results." Such exchanges, and the accompanying possibility that statistical rigor might break out, are a bit like the Loch Ness monster, and the accompanying possibility that some harmless Scot may end up in the belly of the beast.

On the other hand, it would be a matter of routine for astronomers to inquire into a statement about how one class of stars is more likely to go supernova than another. Routine, too, for this to become a dispute about the size of the data set. That is the new "demarcation" that Mayo proposes. It is not the theories but the tests of the theories that must be open to challenge and refutation.

This leaves us with the Duhem problem though.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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