From: "Wallace Polsom" <wallace-AT-raggedclaws.com>
Subject: BHA: Re: Re: Theology and critical realist praxis
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 09:50:59 -0600


Tobin writes:

> here one could note that dictionary
> definitions don't necessarily help since we are
> discussing philosophical concepts rather than
> common parlance

And here are two bits of evidence:

In "Studies in the Logic of Confirmation" (1945), Carl G. Hempel writes:

     "In the discussion of scientific method, the concept of relevant
evidence plays an important part. And while certain 'inductivist' accounts
of scientific procedure seem to assume that **relevant evidence, or relevant
data,** [emphasis added] can be collected in the context of an inquiry prior
to the formulation of any hypothesis, it should be clear upon brief
reflection that relevance is a relative concept; experiential data can be
said to be relevant or irrelevant only with respect to a given hypothesis;
and it is the hypothesis which determines what kind of data or evidence are
relevant for it. Indeed, an empirical finding is relevant for a hypothesis
if and only if it constitutes either favourable or unfavourable evidence for
it; it other words, if it either confirms or disconfirms the hypothesis.
Thus, a precise definition of relevance presupposes an analysis of
confirmation and disconfirmation."

And in the revised edition of _Pursuit of Truth_ (1992), W.V. Quine writes:

     "Within this baffling tangle of relations between our sensory
stimulation and our scientific theory of the world, there is a segment that
we can gratefully separate out and clarify without pursuing neurology,
psychology, psycholinguistics, genetics, or history. It is the part where
theory is tested by prediction. **It is the relation of evidential
support,** [emphasis added] and its essentials can be schematized by means
of little more than logical analysis.
     "Not that prediction is the main purpose of science. Our major purpose
is understanding. Another is control and modification of the environment.
Prediction can be a purpose too, but my present point is that it is the
*test* of a theory, whatever the purpose.
     "It is common usage to say that the evidence for science is
observation, and that what we predict are observations. But the notion of
observation is awkward to analyze. Clarification has been sought by a shift
to observable objects and events. But a gulf yawns between them and our
immediate input from the external world, which is rather the triggering of
our sensory receptors. I have cut through all this by settling for the
triggering or stimulation itself and hence speaking, oddly perhaps, of the
prediction of stimulation. By the stimulation undergone by a subject on a
given occasion I just mean the temporally ordered set of all those of his
exteroceptors that are triggered on that occasion
     "Observation then drops out as a technical notion. So does evidence, if
that was observation. We can deal with the question of evidence for science
without the help of 'evidence' as a technical term. We can make do instead
with the notion of observation sentences."

And so I write:

The point is not that we must agree with Hempel or Quine. The point is that
Tobin has a point.





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