Mark Rubin

Anyone know of any good papers on the role of postdiction/retrodiction in theory appraisal?

#philsci

Before we can look into the way scientists use predictions to evaluate theories, we have to take account of an unfortunate linguistic confusion. In ordinary language “predict” means “foretell” or “prophesy,” implying a statement about future events. But physicists (and many other scientists) currently use the word to mean “deduce from a theory,” whether before or after the fact is known or has occurred. Occasionally one finds the phrase “predict in advance” used to specify prediction of a future event, and sometimes the context indicates that this is what is meant, but very little use is made of terms like retrodiction” or “postdiction.” The physicist-philosopher Henry Margenau made this quite explicit: The word prediction, as used in science, does not mean “forecast” in a temporal sense. Pre implies “prior to completed knowledge”; it does not contrast with post as does ante. The counterpart to prefix is not postfix but suffix. It is therefore unnecessary to coin a new word, postdiction, to denote what we should call prediction of the past. The use of this word, though it has been suggested, would seem a bit “preposterous.”

Interesting! I think it was @brianhaig.bsky.social who recommended Brush's (2015) book to me. Seems relevant here too...

global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Exploratory hypothesis tests can be more compelling than confirmatory hypothesis tests Preregistration has been proposed as a useful method for making a publicly verifiable distinction between confirmatory hypothesis tests, which involve planned tests of ante hoc hypotheses, and expl...

Rubin & Donkin (2024). Exploratory hypothesis tests can be more compelling than confirmatory hypothesis tests. Philosophical Psychology.

Novel prediction and the problem of low-quality accommodation - Synthese The accommodation of evidence has been argued to be associated with several methodological problems that should prompt evaluators to lower their confidence in the accommodative theory. Accommodators m...

Syrjänen (2023). Novel prediction and the problem of low-quality accommodation. Synthese.

Barnes (2022). Prediction versus accommodation. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Dellsén (2021). An epistemic advantage of accommodation over prediction.

Prediction Versus Accommodation and the Risk of Overfitting | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Vol 55, No 1 Abstract When a scientist uses an observation to formulate a theory, it is no surprise that the resulting theory accurately captures that observation. However, when the theory makes a novel prediction...

Hitchcock & Sober (2004). Prediction versus accommodation and the risk of overfitting. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Note sure if the following are the sorts of papers you're after here, but...

Paywall: doi.org/10.1038/s441...

Read-only Access: rdcu.be/e0eCb

Towards a habit-rupture model of intergroup contact in everyday settings - Nature Reviews Psychology The literature assumes that intergroup contact is naturally occurring, positive and consistently associated with positive outcomes, but these premises are inconsistent with everyday intergroup contact...

Paywall: doi.org/10.1038/s441...

Read-Only Access: rdcu.be/e0eCb

Interesting thread that touches on issues I have tried to address in my articles about replication and well as my book (especially chapters 7 and 8).
#psychology #philsky

Oh thanks Boryslaw! Appreciate that! 🙂

Yeah, I suppose the word "new" does its fair share of the work too. Nonetheless, I get his point, as I get yours!

"The purpose of deductive processes is to reveal, or uncover the latent consequences of the axiomatic basis adopted. Nothing essentially new can be discovered, but the coherence of the whole structure can be usefully demonstrated, and its consistency to some extent tested. In the future these processes will perhaps be carried out better by machines than by men."

I realise I was sort of parroting Fisher (1956, p. 108) with that last comment BTW!

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The Industrialisation of Science Comment on Mel Andrews' Recent Essay

I like the word "mechanical" here. You can't discover novel info with a mechanical process. Reminds me of the factory metaphor for replications and the industrialization of science.

But also, yes, "too much robustness" is a really interesting point...

"A good paper *should not* be robust. There must be assumptions whose alteration will alter the results. If it did not, the paper would be uncovering something mechanical."

So, I agree there's definitely a grey area when considering what's the "correct" single specification as well as for what's the "correct" multiverse analysis!

Thanks Ingo! Glad Nicholas' post triggered such interesting thoughts.

The thing I kept thinking about was the word "correct" and what it means when applied to test assumptions. I found this paper is very good when thinking about that...

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Non-adjustment for multiple testing in multi-arm trials of distinct treatments: Rationale and justification - Richard A Parker, Christopher J Weir, 2020 There is currently a lack of consensus and uncertainty about whether one should adjust for multiple testing in multi-arm trials of distinct treatments. A detail...

Great paper! Another good one is Parker and Weir (2020):

"If a type I error rate is of great concern for a given treatment, then this should be addressed by the individual α-levels themselves – not indirectly via controlling the overall FWER [familywise error rate]."

A causal theory of suppositional reasoning - Philosophical Studies Philosophical Studies - Suppositions can be classified as indicative versus subjunctive and full versus partial. We propose a causal account of suppositional reasoning that naturally unifies all...

New paper distinguishes between four types of suppositional reasoning

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All for it! From memory, something like this was adaopted by some journals previously. Forgot what they called it.

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Stop Formatting Before the Desk Reject

Proposal from @bnbakker.bsky.social and @jakobkas.bsky.social for a staged submission process when submitting manuscripts to academic journals.

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