Philosophy of Science 58 (4):523-552 (1991)
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Abstract |
While many philosophers of science have accorded special evidential significance to tests whose results are "novel facts", there continues to be disagreement over both the definition of novelty and why it should matter. The view of novelty favored by Giere, Lakatos, Worrall and many others is that of use-novelty: An accordance between evidence e and hypothesis h provides a genuine test of h only if e is not used in h's construction. I argue that what lies behind the intuition that novelty matters is the deeper intuition that severe tests matter. I set out a criterion of severity akin to the notion of a test's power in Neyman-Pearson statistics. I argue that tests which are use-novel may fail to be severe, and tests that are severe may fail to be use-novel. I discuss the 1919 eclipse data as a severe test of Einstein's law of gravity
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DOI | 10.1086/289639 |
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References found in this work BETA
Conjectures and Refutations.Karl R. Popper - 1968 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 19 (2):159-168.
Why Did Einstein's Programme Supersede Lorentz's? (I).Elie Zahar - 1973 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24 (2):95-123.
Logical Versus Historical Theories of Confirmation.Alan Musgrave - 1974 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 25 (1):1-23.
Realism and the Aim of Science.Karl R. Popper & W. W. Bartley - 1983 - Philosophy of Science 50 (4):669-671.
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Citations of this work BETA
The Multiplicity of Experimental Protocols: A Challenge to Reductionist and Non-Reductionist Models of the Unity of Neuroscience.Jacqueline Sullivan - 2009 - Synthese 167 (3):511-539.
Prediction Versus Accommodation and the Risk of Overfitting.Christopher Hitchcock & Elliott Sober - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (1):1-34.
Severe Testing as a Basic Concept in a Neyman–Pearson Philosophy of Induction.Deborah G. Mayo & Aris Spanos - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (2):323-357.
View all 49 citations / Add more citations
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