Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

As you probably remember from my frequent recent mentions, I've been working my way through a book on probability, statistics, and the philosophy of science, STATISTICAL INFERENCE AS SEVERE TESTING, by Deborah Mayo.   This will be my last quote from that book. From p. 367, "It is supposed in many fields of social and biological science that nearly everything is related to everything: 'all nulls are false.' Meehl dubbed this the crud factor." What follows is a description of a psychology survey done by the University of Minnesota in 1966 in which all of the following showed some degree of (often low though statistically significant) correlation -- attitudes toward school, leisure activities, educational plans, parents' occupations, siblings, birth order, family attitudes. religious preferences, MCAT scores, etc. Every null hypothesis is false. Mayo tells us that Meehl here is also eager to explain that this is not what statisticians call a "Type 1 error...

Readers may recall that I've been writing of late about Deborah Mayo, a professor at Virginia Tech.  To restate, Mayo has written Statistical Inference as Severe Testing ; a book discussing statistics, induction, and the philosophy of science. Much of the book is obscure to me, though I skim through what I have to in order to get to stuff where I can gain something. To move forward nonetheless: near the middle of the book she has a discussion of the Higgs boson. Allow me to talk about that today.  Back in 1964 Peter Higgs predicted the eventual discovery of a certain particle that would be responsible for other particles having mass. This became known as the "Higgs boson" or, more grandly as the "God particle"! Over the following decades the Higgs boson came to be regarded as an important piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, and the fact that no one had experimentally confirmed its existence became something of a scandal.  Then came 2012, and CERN, ...

  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...