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EMPIRICIST DEMURRAL In McMullin’s description of retroductive inference as the process by which science arrives at theories, we encounter a great liberalization of traditional epistemology’s view of the sciences. As McMullin moves to his conclusion, he shows us how much had to be progressively discarded. First, the Aristotelian tradition’s pretension that we can arrive at […]

MCMULLINS SOPHISTICATED SCIENTIFIC REALISM McMullin did not much like the use of “true” and “truth” in this context. In his well-known “A Case for Scientific Realism,” he ends by apparently eschewing claims to truth altogether: Bas C. van Fraassen 137 I do not think that acceptance of a scientific theory involves the belief that it

MCMULLIN CLAIMS ON BEHALF OF RETRODUCTION Those claims I introduced briefly above; let me quote the entire passage now: retroduction is not an atemporal application of rule as deduction is. It is extended in time, and logically very complex. It is properly inference, since it enables one to move in thought from the observation of

AN ANALOGY, TO ARRIVE AT WHAT MAY BE DISTINCTIVELY DIFFERENT As an analogy, suppose that someone wanted to construct an account not of what science is but of business, commerce. If someone starts a business, he will begin by amassing some capital, acquire a place of business, equipment, inventory, employees, and begin to advertise. As

MCMULLIN ACCOUNT OF RETRODUCTIVE INFERENCE It is in fact not easy to disentangle the points that allow us to recognize a process of retroductive inference from the claims McMullin makes concerning this sort of inference. We must concentrate on the definitive account that McMullin provides in the last 5 pages (in the reprint that follows)

CONTRASTING MCMULLIN(S) VISION WITH RIVAL EPISTEMOLOGIES McMullin does enough to discredit some alternative projects with a similar aim, such as attempts to define induction as a method for science. Today other projects of that sort exist as well, drawing in one way or another on the concept and theories of probability, notably varieties of Bayesianism

THE MATHEMATICAL PRACTICE OBJECTION For the modified indispensability theorist, the choice between strong fact and no-fact hinges on developments in physics (and per- haps the rest of science). We should now ask the impact of this choice: How would the pursuit of our independent question be af- fected by it? In other words, we want

FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS Here the fundamental theories are general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the central problem is to reconcile the two. Three of the fundamental forces-electromagnetic, weak, and strong-have yielded more or less workable quantum-field descriptions, but grav- ity remains intractable. The mathematics of quantum-field theories has an annoying habit of generating impossible (infinite)

FOUNDATIONS OF SET THEORY My second reservation about the indispensability arguments rests on somewhat less familiar grounds; to reach it, I must review a bit of set theory and (in the next section) a bit of physics. It is well-known that the standard axioms of contemporary set theory, ZFC, are not enough to decide every

INDISPENSABILITY AND PRACTICE 281 sarily recommended the removal of atoms from, say, chemical theory; they did, however, hold that only the directly verifiable con- sequences of atomic theory should be believed, whatever the explan- atory power or the fruitfulness or the systematic advantages of think- ing in terms of atoms. In other words, the confirmation