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...
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Hilary Putnam tell the story of his taking to his supervisor, Hans Reichenbach, a copy of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. Putnam told Reichenbach: “it is an extraordinary paper; Quine argues that the difference between the analytic and the synthetic is not a difference of kind, but one of degree.” Reichenbach looked puzzled and then replied “Hilary, is the difference between a difference of kind and one of degree a difference of kind or one of degree?”.
In a long footnote in The Principles of Psychology , William James discussed the analytic/synthetic dichotomy. He consigned it to a footnote because he was sick of the subject, thinking it a "waste of ink and paper." W.V.O. Quine would come to much the same conclusion, 60 years later, after much more paper and ink had been employed. James provides us in the course of this footnote with a geometrical example of why the effort to maintain a consistently dichotomous relationship between these two sorts of statements is such a waste. "No one will say that such analytic judgments as 'equidistant lines can nowhere meet' are pure tautologies. The predicate is a somewhat new way of conceiving as well as of naming the subject. There is something 'ampliative' in our greatest truism, our state of mind is richer after than before we have uttered them." Now, if he had written "parallel lines can never meet" he would he stated neither a synth...