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Underdeterminism and Scientific realism

Hi Nick,
 
very well put, i will try and reply in kind.
 
1. i am only fully aware of two explicit models of Inference to the Best Explanation. First, Peirce's account of abduction as a form of inference different from both induction and deduction; and second, Peter Lipton's more detailed and developed account in his book of the same name. Both are certainly pragmatic. Perhaps you could slightly explicate your claim for me as i am not sure what formulations you mean.
 
2. this is the point i have most trouble problematizing.
 
3. that does make it much clearer, and i did not mean to imply that you were arguing that UT was antirealist. Although, to play devil's advocate for a moment, some (Quine) would certainly intentionally conflate ontology and epistemology in that it is very difficult to make sense of epistemically inaccessible objects - that is, the limits of our epistemology are the limits of our ontology. In which case UT is not strictly antirealist, but nor is it realist - it claim ambiguity or unknowability or ambivalence.
4. I think your problem of the possibility of adding a true conditional can be resolved if were have recourse to Lewis (for anybody who needs NIck's weird conditional clarifying: a conditional is false if and only if the antecedent is true and the consequent is false; it is true in all cases where the consequent is true i.e. the observable truth of the water and the tap etc). Lewis suggested a conditional rendered with strict, as opposed to material implication. Strict implication is often used (in many logics and elsewhere) to require a relation between the antecedent and the consequent. If this were the case Nick could not qualify his theory with his conditional as the connection is utterly spurious. This would deny the positive instance being a case for his theory. I don't think this disagrees with Nick...in fact it supports his last sentence.

cheers,
andy.

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