There are many proposed aims for scientific inquiry--to explain or predict events, to confirm or falsify hypotheses, or to find hypotheses that cohere with our other beliefs in some logical or probabilistic sense. This book is devoted to a different proposal--that the logical structure of the scientist's method should guarantee eventual arrival at the truth given the scientist's background assumptions. Interest in this methodological property, called "logical reliability," stems from formal learning theory, which draws its insights not from the theory of probability, but from the theory of...
There are many proposed aims for scientific inquiry--to explain or predict events, to confirm or falsify hypotheses, or to find hypotheses that cohere...