Abstract
It is argued that the conjunction effect has a disjunctive analog of strong interest for the realism–antirealism debate. It is possible that a proper theory is more confirmed than its (more probable) observational sub-theory and hence than the latter’s disjunctive equivalent, i.e., the disjunction of all proper theories that are empirically equivalent to the given one. This is illustrated by a toy model.
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References
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Acknowledgements
I like to thank David Atkinson for his stimulating questions and his help in checking and finding proofs. Thanks are also due to Igor Douven and Jeanne Peijnenburg for their suggestions. Finally, thanks to the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS,Wassenaar) where I could complete this paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Kuipers, T.A.F. A realist partner for Linda: confirming a theoretical hypothesis more than its observational sub-hypothesis. Synthese 184, 63–71 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9697-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9697-3