Posts Tagged With: Kent Staley

Kent Staley has written a clear and engaging introduction to PhilSci that manages to blend the central key topics of philosophy of science with current philosophy of statistics. Quite possibly, Staley explains Error Statistics more clearly in many ways than I do in his 10 page section, 9.4. CONGRATULATIONS STALEY*

You can get this book for free by merely writing one of the simpler palindrome’s in the December contest.

Here’s an excerpt from that section:

Staley

9.4 Error-statistical philosophy of science and severe testing

Deborah Mayo has developed an alternative approach to the interpretation of frequentist statistical inference (Mayo 1996). But the idea at the heart of Mayo’s approach is one that can be stated without invoking probability at all. ….

Mayo takes the following “minimal scientific principle for evidence” to be uncontroversial:

Principle 3 (Minimal principle for evidence) Data xo provide poor evidence for H if they result from a method or procedure that has little or no ability of finding flaws in H, even if H is false.(Mayo and Spanos, 2009, 3) Continue reading →