Old Evidence and New Explanation

旧证据和新解释

• 批准号: 9528893
• 负责人: Carl Wagner
• 金额: $ 3万
• 依托单位: University of Tennessee Knoxville
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Fixed Price Award
• 财政年份: 1996
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1996-05-01 至 1998-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9528893&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Old; Evidence; New; Explanation

Theories are created in science to explain a certain set of phenomena. Intuitively, however, we tend to increase our belief in a new theory if it not only explains the phenomena that it was specifically created to address but then is found to follow from something we had already accepted. Yet in Bayesian Probability Theory, the dominant tradition concerning the confirmation of scientific theories, old evidence does not increase the probability of new theories. How should this so-called `old evidence/new explanation` issue be resolved? Richard Jeffrey came up with one solution. Professor Wagner is extending Jeffrey's principles and, in process, gives rise to two different revision methods for generalization of this problem. The PI will investigate both the mathematical and the philosophical aspects of this phenomenon, both because of the intrinsic interest of generalizations of the old evidence/new explanation problem and in order to clarify the essence of Jeffrey's solution to the classical version of this problem.

科学中创建理论是为了解释一组特定的现象。然而，直觉上，如果一种新理论不仅解释了专门为解决该问题而创建的现象，而且发现它是从我们已经接受的某些东西中得出的结论，那么我们倾向于增加对它的信念。 然而，在贝叶斯概率论（关于证实科学理论的主导传统）中，旧证据并不能增加新理论的概率。 这个所谓的“旧证据/新解释”问题该如何解决？ 理查德·杰弗里想出了一个解决方案。 瓦格纳教授正在扩展杰弗里的原则，并在此过程中提出了两种不同的修正方法来推广该问题。 PI 将研究这种现象的数学和哲学方面，这既是因为旧证据/新解释问题的概括的内在兴趣，也是为了澄清杰弗里对该问题的经典版本的解决方案的本质。