(2004-05-18) Mayo Error Knowledge

Cosma Shalizi reviews Deborah Mayo's Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (ISBN:0226511987 ). Put bluntly and concretely: why, since neither can be deduced rigorously from unquestionable premises, should we put more trust in David Grinspoon's ideas about Venus than in those of Immanuel Velikovsky?... In the next to last chapter Mayo tries her hand at one of American philosophy's perennial amusements, the game of Charles S Peirce Knew It All Along. (If, as Whitehead said, European thought is a series of footnotes to Plato, American thought is a series of footnotes to Peirce - and JonathanEdwards, worse luck.)... Mayo succeeds in everything important she sets out to do; she may even have succeeded, in her long discussions of Thomas Kuhn (in chs. 2 and 4) in defanging him, but I frankly couldn't work up enough interest in her interpretation of Kuhn's interpretation of Karl Popper (sometimes, her interpretation of other people's interpretations of Kuhn's interpretation of Popper) to see if she really succeeds in turning Kuhn's sociological descriptions into methodological prescriptions. (Bayesian, Neyman Pearson)