The Systematicity Arguments pp 19-41 | Cite as
Some History and Philosophy of Science
Abstract
One way in which scientific theories are confirmed by data is by finding instances in which observations conform to a theory’s law-like generalizations. So, when Newton’s theory along with initial and boundary conditions enables an astronomer to accurately predict the successive positions of the planets, one has some measure of confirmation for Newtonian gravitation theory. Such articulation of theory in order to fit the available data is a paradigmatic scientific activity. Yet, it appears that not all scientific reasoning works this way. Sometimes scientific reasoning attempts to show that, even though two theories are able to accommodate a given body of data, one theory can accommodate it or explain it better than can its rival. Copernicans thought they had such reasoning to provide against Ptolemaic astronomy. Charles Darwin thought he had such reasoning against the creationism of his day. In these cases, the Copernicans and the Darwinians thought they had at least a prima facie reason to believe that their theory better explains a given body of data. While one paradigmatic scientific activity is fitting theory to data, another paradigmatic scientific activity is showing how one theory better fits a given body of facts than does its rival.
Keywords
Turing Machine Empirical Generalization Systematicity Argument Retrograde Motion Auxiliary HypothesisPreview
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Notes
- 1.The following discussion owes much to Kuhn, (1957), and Glymour, (1980).Google Scholar
- 3.Cf., e.g., Fodor & McLaughlin, (1990), p. 202.Google Scholar
- 5.Fodor and McLaughlin threaten to conflate these two issues in the following passage: The point of the problem that systematicity poses for a Connectionist account is not to show that systematic cognitive processes are possible given the assumptions of a Connectionist architecture, but to explain how systematicity could be necessary—how it could be a law that cognitive capacities are systematic—given those assumptions (Fodor & McLaughlin, 1990, p. 202). Here the proposed lawlike status of the explanandum is not clearly distinguished from the relationship between the explanandum and the explanans.Google Scholar
- 6.A nice account of this may be found in Ruben, (1990).Google Scholar
- 7.Recall Fodor & Pylyshyn, (1988), pp. 47–48.Google Scholar
- 8.For example, Dennett, (1991), van Gelder and Niklasson, (1994), Cummins, (1996b), and Hadley & Hay ward, (1997).Google Scholar
- 9.In defense of a model of certain systematic relations in thought, Hadley, (1997), sketches cases of explanations that he supposes do not have this structure.Google Scholar
- 10.For the details of how these conclusions are reached experimentally through a habituation paradigm, the reader is referred to Karmiloff-Smith, (1992), pp. 67–72.Google Scholar