Castellani, Elena and Dardashti, Radin and Dawid, Richard (2025) Unification and Surprise: On the Confirmatory Reach of Unification. [Preprint]

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Abstract

There is no doubt that a theory that is unified has a certain appeal. Scientific practice in fundamental physics relies heavily on it. But is a unified theory more likely to be empirically adequate than a non-unified theory? Myrvold has pointed out that, on a Bayesian account, only a specific form of unification, which he calls mutual information unification, can have confirmatory value. In this paper, we argue that Myrvold’s analysis suffers from an overly narrow understanding of what counts as evidence. If one frames evidence in a way that includes observations beyond the theory’s intended domain, one finds a much richer and more interesting perspective on the connection between unification and theory confirmation. By adopting this strategy, we give a Bayesian account of unification that (i) goes beyond mutual information unification to include other cases of unification, and (ii) gives a crucial role to the element of surprise in the discovery of a unified theory. We illus- trate the explanatory strength of this account with some cases from fundamental physics and other disciplines.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Castellani, Elena elena.castellani@unifi.it 0000-0002-9352-4473 Dardashti, Radin Dardashti@uni-wuppertal.de 0000-0002-7205-6893 Dawid, Richard richard.dawid@philosophy.su.se 0000-0002-1472-2958
Keywords:	Confirmation, Unification, Bayesian Epistemology, Whewell's Consilience, Surprise
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > Philosophers of Science Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Values In Science
Depositing User:	Dr. Radin Dardashti
Date Deposited:	29 Jan 2025 13:47
Last Modified:	29 Jan 2025 13:47
Item ID:	24651
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > Philosophers of Science Specific Sciences > Physics General Issues > Values In Science
Date:	2025
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/24651

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