In his book, Chalmers gived many arguments to show how indefendable is the inductivist view of science. Then he discussed of different fallbacks an inductivist might adopt to defend its view (chapter 3). One of the fallback is the probabilistic view of science. Chalmers’ arguments don’t convince me at all. So I was wondering where my reasoning gets wrong (since I presume no inductivist theory is tenable).
- Scientist main job is to provide theories that explain facts. 2) Of course, facts are not purely objective: they are set out in a conceptualized language, and they are the results of our scientific and cultural heritage (I mean by this that we are biased in our research of facts). 3) Nonetheless, statements that set out facts are public and faillible, and hence could be publicly criticized by the scientific community. So they provide some “objectivity” (in a lesser sense) to facts. 4) Of course, we can’t espace the problem of induction. In other words, the certainty of scientific theories are not grounded on the logic of inductions. 5) The assurance we have that theories are to some extend tied to reality comes from the theory of probability. In short, once a scientist has formulated a theory, he has to test it with a statistical method. In short, he takes several independant facts (data) and computes the probability that chance alone could yield the same distribution of results. A theory is accepted when there is less than 1% (or 5% in social science) that chance alone could explain the data. 6) So a probabilistic inductivist admits we are not .sure that a theory is good, but since the results could not be explained by chance alone, we know some factors must been playing a role in the experience, and so we postulate that theory defended is the best attempt to explain away the role of those factors.
For me, this account is inductivist, at least in spirit. From a website on inductivism:
(shef.ac.uk/~phil/courses/312/01inductiv.htm)
A) So is this account of science plausible? B) Is this account of science an inductivist account?
Thanks for any reply