Abstract :
Going back at least to Duhem, there is a tradition of thinking that crucial experiments
are impossible in science. I analyse Duhem’s arguments and show that they are based
on the excessively strong assumption that only deductive reasoning is permissible in
experimental science. This opens the possibility that some principle of inductive inference
could provide a sufficient reason for preferring one among a group of hypotheses on
the basis of an appropriately controlled experiment. To be sure, there are analogues
to Duhem’s problems that pertain to inductive inference. Using a famous experiment
from the history of molecular biology as an example, I show that an experimentalist
version of inference to the best explanation (IBE) does a better job in handling these
problems than other accounts of scientific inference. Furthermore, I introduce a concept
of experimental mechanism and show that it can guide inferences from data within an
IBE-based framework for induction.
