Osimani, Barbara and Landes, Juergen
(2021)
Varieties of Error and Varieties of Evidence in Scientific Inference, Forthcoming in The British Journal for Philosophy of Science.
[Preprint]
Abstract
According to the Variety of Evidence Thesis items of evidence from independent lines of investigation are more confirmatory, ceteris paribus, than e.g. replications of analogous studies. This thesis is known to fail Bovens and Hartmann (2003), Claveau (2013). How- ever, the results obtained by the former only concern instruments whose evidence is either fully random or perfectly reliable; instead in Claveau (2013), unreliability is modelled as deterministic bias. In both cases, the unreliable instrument delivers totally irrelevant information. We present a model which formalises both reliability, and unreliability, differently. Our instruments are either reliable, but affected by random error, or they are biased but not deterministically so.
Bovens and Hartmann’s results are counter-intuitive in that in their model a long series of consistent reports from the same instrument does not raise suspicion of “too-good-to- be-true” evidence. This happens precisely because they neither contemplate the role of systematic bias, nor unavoidable random error of reliable instruments. In our model the Variety of Evidence Thesis fails as well, but the area of failure is considerably smaller than for Bovens and Hartmann (2003), Claveau (2013) and holds for (the majority of) realistic cases (that is, where biased instruments are very biased). The essential mechanism which triggers VET failure is the rate of false to true positives for the two kinds of instruments. Our emphasis is on modelling beliefs about sources of knowledge and their role in hypothesis confirmation in interaction with dimensions of evidence, such as variety and consistency.
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