NDLI: Evaluating competing theories via a common language of qualitative verdicts

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Gaertner, Wulf Wüthrich, Nicolas
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	Kuhn (The essential tension—Selected studies in scientific tradition and change, 1977) claimed that several algorithms can be defended to select the best theory based on epistemic values such as simplicity, accuracy, and fruitfulness. In a recent paper, Okasha (Mind 129(477):83–115, 2011) argued that no theory choice algorithm exists which satisfies a set of intuitively compelling conditions that Arrow (Social choice and individual values, 1963) had proposed for a consistent aggregation of individual preference orderings. In this paper, we put forward a solution to avoid this impossibility result. Based on previous work by Gaertner and Xu (Mathematical Social Sciences 63:193–196, 2012), we suggest to view the theory choice problem in a cardinal context and to use a general scoring function defined over a set of qualitative verdicts for every epistemic value. This aggregation method yields a complete and transitive ranking and the rule satisfies all Arrovian conditions appropriately reformulated within a cardinal setting. We also propose methods that capture the aggregation across different scientists.
Starting Page	3293
Ending Page	3309
Page Count	17
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00397857
Journal	Synthese
Volume Number	193
Issue Number	10
e-ISSN	15730964
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2015-10-07
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Theory choice Social choice theory Scoring rules Thomas S. Kuhn Epistemic values Philosophy of Science Epistemology Logic Philosophy of Language Metaphysics
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy Social Sciences

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