Glymour's theory of bootstrap confirmation accurately explains scientific evidence
the verdict
REFUTED
the evidence says no
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
0 sources for · 2 against
Scholarly literature evaluating Clark Glymour's theory of bootstrap confirmation indicates that his formal characterization encounters significant counterexamples and is untenable without major modifications.
Scientific arguments often attribute the credit or blame for particular experimental or observational results to fragments of theories rather than to the whole of them. The thesis of Theory and Evidence (Glymour 1980) is that there are structural criteria that account for at least part of the distribution of credit and blame; the book also attempts a tentative formal characterization of one structural criterion. David Christensen (1983) has produced a series of counterexamples which show that the formal characterization is untenable. The question remains whether the failure is due to an oversight in the formal theory or to the falsity of the very idea that there are structural criteria for evidential relevance. Since the counterexamples are uniformly eliminated by a single formal principle, I incline to the first answer.
Glymour has developed an account of the confirmation of scientific hypotheses which he advocates as an alternative to the hypothetico-deductive and Bayesian accounts. This account is subject to a counter-example which may be accomodated by a slight modification. So modified it describes an important dimension of confirmation. If the modification of Glymour's account is slightly extended, both the resulting account and the hypothetico-deductive account may be seen as special cases of a Bayesian theory which is immune to Glymour's criticisms.
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