2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

PSA Abstracts
recognize as optional, suppose and choose. There is always a gap between the
agent’s commitments and fulfillment of these commitments. As a consequence
there is a difference between changes in the various attitudes cited above that are
changes in commitments and changes in performance fulfilling such commitments.
Advocates of principles of diachronic rationality sometimes seem to conflate these
two kinds of changes. Deliberation crowds out prediction: An agent deliberating
as to which of the options the agent recognizes to be available ought to be chosen
and implemented cannot coherently in the same context assign unconditional
probabilities to the propositions predicting the agent’s implementation of these
options. Prediction crowds out deliberation. If an agent predicts that the agent will
implement a given project, implementation cannot be under the agent’s control
from the agent’s point of view. I shall elaborate on these ideas and explore some of
their ramifications for decision making and belief change using illustrations derived
from the literature on injunctions against Dutch Books or choosing options that
are “dominated” by others.
Peter␣ J. Lewis University of Miami
In Which Error Statistics Rescues Realism from the Pessimistic Induction
The pessimistic induction is a family of arguments, each to the effect that the falsity
of past scientific theories undermines our justification for thinking that current
scientific theories are true. Putnam and Laudan present rather different versions of
the pessimistic induction, but both fall within the naturalistic tradition in philosophy,
which holds that philosophical claims such as realism are to be evaluated on the
basis of empirical evidence. Most of the considerable literature on this topic attempts
to defend scientific realism by attacking the historical evidence. However, I argue
that a careful look at scientific methodology, using error statistics (Mayo 1996),
shows that both Putnam and Laudan make methodological mistakes that render
their evidence harmless to scientific realism. Even if all their historical claims are
granted, their conclusions acquire no empirical support.
P
S
A
Michelle Little Northwestern University
Rethinking Experimentation
Hacking (1983) argues against a linguistic, representational approach to justifying
our beliefs that the unobservable entities described in the sciences really exist.
He favors in its stead an experimenting approach such that “engineering, not
theorizing, is the best proof of scientific realism about entities” (1983: 274). In
light of that perspective, Representing and Intervening concludes with a
skepticism about the existence of black holes (p. 275), a position he expanded
six years later in “Extragalactic Reality: The Case of Gravitational Lensing.”
227