Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:19:34.482Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comment on “The Structure of a Scientific Paper” by Frederick Suppe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Allan Franklin  and
Colin Howson
Allan Franklin*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, University of Colorado
Colin Howson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, London School of Economics
*
†Send reprint requests to the first author, Department of Physics, Campus Box 390, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0390.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

On the basis of an analysis of a single paper on plate tectonics, a paper whose actual content is nowhere in evidence, Frederick Suppe concludes that no standard model of confirmation—hypothetico-deductive, Bayesian-inductive, or inference to the best explanation—can account for the structure of a scientific paper that reports an experimental result. He further argues on the basis of a survey of scientific papers, a survey whose data and results are also absent, that papers which have a rather stringent length limit, such as the one on plate tectonics, are typical of science. Thus, he concludes that no standard confirmation scheme is capable of dealing with scientific practice. Suppe also requires that an adequate model of philosophical testing should be able to account for everything in such scientific papers, in which space is at a premium.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 65 , Issue 3 , September 1998 , pp. 411 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abe, F., Albrow, M.G., Amendolia, S.R., et al. (1994a), “Evidence for Top Quark Production in pp Collisions at √s = 1.8 TeV”, Physical Review Letters 73: 225–231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abe, F., Albrow, M.G., Amendolia, S.R., et al. (1994b), “Evidence for Top Quark Production in pp Collisions at √s = 1.8 TeV”, Physical Review D 50: 2966–3026.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abe, F., Albrow, M.G., Amendolia, S.R., et al. (1995), “Observation of Top Quark Production in pp Collisions with the Collider Detector at Fermilab”, Physical Review Letters 74: 2626–2631.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, M.H., Ensher, J.R., Matthews, M.R., et al. (1995), “Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation in a Dilute Atomic Vapor”, Science 269: 198–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dorling, J. (1979), “Bayesian Personalism, the Methodology of Research Programmes, and Duhem's Problem”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 10: 177–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franklin, A. (1986), The Neglect of Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franklin, A. (1990), Experiment, Right or Wrong. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franklin, A. and Howson, C. (1988), “It Probably is a Valid Experimental Result: A Bayesian Approach to the Epistemology of Experiment”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 19: 419–427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howson, C. and Franklin, A. (1994), “Bayesian Conditionalisation and Probability Kinematics”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45: 451–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howson, C. and Urbach, P. (1993), Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach. Chicago: Open Court.Google Scholar
Savage, L.J. (1954), Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Wood, CS., Bennett, S.C., Cho, D., et al. (1997), “Measurement of Parity Nonconservation and an Anapole Moment in Cesium”, Science 275: 1759–1763.CrossRefGoogle Scholar