[I]n saying these words, we are doing something ...rather than reporting something.
Austin (1962, p. 13)
Abstract
Pierre Duhem’s influential argument for holism relies on a view of the role that background theory plays in testing: according to this still common account of “auxiliary hypotheses,” elements of background theory serve as truth-apt premises in arguments for or against a hypothesis. I argue that this view is mistaken. Rather than serving as truth-apt premises in arguments, auxiliary hypotheses are employed as (reliability-apt) “epistemic tools”: instruments that perform specific tasks in connecting our theoretical questions with the world but that are not (or not usually) premises in arguments. On the resulting picture, the acceptability of an auxiliary hypothesis depends not on its truth but on contextual factors such as the task or purpose it is put to and the other tools employed alongside it.
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Notes
I’m not interested in diving into questions of what Duhem really meant, and will generally refer to the schematized “Duhemian” from now on; for a discussion of Duhem’s intended argument, see Ariew (2018).
This may seem obvious, but the issue of just how heterozygous populations are was a fraught one for mid-twentieth century biology; see, e.g., Lewontin (1974).
Of course, this description is idealized. The inclusion of other stochastic processes such as drift or complicating factors such as linkage disequilibrium mean that such inferences will necessarily be statistical. But the simple description suffices for our point.
Compare Filion and Moir (2018, p. 739), who employ a related notion of reliability in a more technical context.
I’m implicitly assuming a “materialist” account of induction here (see Norton 2003), but I don’t think that this claim relies on any controversial aspect of Norton’s account.
Of course, Edman’s condition is an idealization. We might expect an unreliable thermometer (like an unreliable clock) to be relatively close. How an instrument is broken matters, and we’ll rarely have no information on that front. The same point can be made about theoretical instruments, however, and so the idealization shouldn’t undermine the point.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank James Nguyen, Anjan Chakravartty, audiences at Notre Dame and at PSA 2018 in Seattle, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this essay.
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Dethier, C. How to Do Things with Theory: The Instrumental Role of Auxiliary Hypotheses in Testing. Erkenn 86, 1453–1468 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00164-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00164-9