published_or_final_version / Philosophy / Master / Master of Philosophy

While there is much data in the experimental cognitive psychology literature reporting that subjects working on science-like tasks ignore findings inconsistent with their hypotheses, much cognitive science research has found that reasoners focus on unexpected findings. To study how real-world scientists deal with unexpected findings, data was collected from a prominent immunology laboratory. Four lab meetings were analyzed using a standardized coding procedure. The amount of reasoning, interactions, and new hypotheses about unexpected versus expected findings was analyzed. Presenters at the meetings reasoned more about unexpected than expected findings, and group members reasoned and interacted extensively about unexpected findings. Both presenter and group members formed more new hypotheses about unexpected than about expected findings. These results are consistent with the finding in cognitive science research that reasoners focus on unexpected data. It is proposed that several heuristics influence which unexpected findings scientists pay attention to.

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This dissertation consists of a defence of scientific realism and a critique of empiricist antirealism. Strict empiricism is discussed in Chapter 1, in which it is argued that this variety of empiricism adequately describes only the initial stages of scientific research. Bas van Frassen's empiricist antirealism is then discussed in Chapter 2. Here, it is argued that this new position, although more sophisticated than earlier forms of empiricist antirealism, fails to constitute a genuinely acceptable alternative to scientific realism. The two main constituents of scientific realism--scientism and critical realism--are then defended in Chapters 3 and 4. Lastly, the superempirical virtues and their role in theory evaluation is discussed in Chapter 5, wherein they are presented as a nonempirical source of quality control on our theorizing.

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published_or_final_version / Philosophy / Master / Master of Arts

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 330-347). / Microfiche. / xviii, 347 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm