| Phi 272 Fall 2013 |
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Giere will provide us not only with a second approach to understanding the confirmation of theories but also with a survey of issues concerning such confirmation and a rather thorough discussion of an important example. Your assignment for Mon. ends with the discussion of that example in Giere’s §5. (We will discuss the rest on Wed.) Giere’s organization is quite clear, so my notes below are just supplementary comments on some of the sections of the paper; apart from these suggestions, Giere himself will indicate what you should pay most attention to.
• You will find many references in Giere to things you have read, but the references in §1 mainly point to things to come. We will be discussing Bayesian approaches to confirmation on Fri., and most of the others he refers to have views similar to, if not inspired by, Kuhn’s.
• Notice that Giere adopts a view of theories primarily as models. That’s what leads him to introduce the idea of a “theoretical hypothesis” and to define ‘theory’ as he does on p. 272.
• Giere’s distinction between “realists” and “antirealists” at the bottom of p. 273 in §3 will be important later in the paper. The antirealists are those referred to as “some thinkers” just above this while the “realists” are the “others.”
• Section 4 begins Giere’s discussion of his account of confirmation. Note the way he sets out the activity as well as his comments on the role of probability. The latter is one of his differences from the approach we will look at on Fri.
• The discussion of the example in §5 is about a third of this assignment and the part we will spend most time on in our discussion. Let me note about it only that the “discovery/justification” distinction Giere speaks of is one that Feigl mentioned (on his p. 4).