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Invoking the Tooth Fairy Twice, Or How to Identify Cases of Ad Hoc Hypothesis Acceptance Sarah Louise Scott a Dissertation

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Invoking the Tooth Fairy Twice, Or How to Identify Cases of Ad Hoc Hypothesis Acceptance Sarah Louise Scott a Dissertation Invoking the Tooth Fairy Twice, or How to Identify Cases of Ad Hoc Hypothesis Acceptance Sarah Louise Scott A dissertation submitted to the University of North Carolina in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy Chapel Hill 2007 Approved by John T. Roberts Marc Lange Alexander Rosenberg William Lycan Thomas Hofweber © 2007 Sarah Louise Scott ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Sarah Louise Scott Invoking the Tooth Fairy Twice, or How to Identify Cases of Ad Hoc Hypothesis Acceptance (Under the direction of John T. Roberts) The light in the refrigerator comes on every time that you open the refrigerator door. Svetlana says that it turns on because of a little man that lives inside. When you ask Svetlana why we never see or otherwise detect the little man, she responds that it must be that the little man is invisible, inaudible and has no mass. A frustrated observer might justly label these posits concerning the little man ‘ad hoc’. Yet, what does this charge of ad hocness amount to? What makes something ad hoc? My dissertation sets out to answer this question. Previous philosophers of science have unsuccessfully attempted to answer this question: for instance, they have explained ad hocness in terms of unfalsifiability, or in terms of the absence of additional test implications, or in terms of the intentions of scientists modifying theories in the face of recalcitrant evidence. What is different about my approach is that, unlike its predecessors, it successfully avoids the Quine testability problem, while still successfully diagnosing ad hocness in our canonical examples of the phenomenon. In this account, ad hocness is equated with jumping to conclusions: adding hypotheses into a theory in order to deal with disconfirming evidence when such an addition is not otherwise warranted. iii To my family iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS John Roberts, for being the most dedicated advisor ever; Marc Lange, for pushing me and questioning my assumptions; Meg Wallace; the Philosophy Departments at UNC – Chapel Hill and at Duke v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One Introduction: How Do We Determine When Something is Ad Hoc?...................................................................1 I. The Big Bang Theory, Dark Matter Theory and The Problem of Ad Hocness.......................................................................1 II. Planck and Blackbody Radiation..............................................................5 III. Introduction to the Project and To Ptolemy............................................10 IV. Ptolemy and Astronomical Motion..........................................................11 V. Hempel and Popper on Ad Hocness.........................................................21 VI. Problems for Hempel’s First Indicator...................................................25 VII. Treating Hempel’s Indicators as Criteria to be Jointly Fulfilled and the Problem of Additional Test Implications.....................33 VIII. More on the Ayer Testability Problem..................................................38 IX. A Critique of Popper’s Conception of Ad Hocness.................................39 X: Ad Hocness as the State of Incessant Modifications…..............................42 XI. What can be Ad Hoc?..............................................................................46 XII. Conclusion...............................................................................................49 Chapter Two Why a Bayesian Account of Ad Hocness Is Not Satisfactory.....................................................................................50 I. Introduction................................................................................................50 vi II. Introduction to the Bayesian Approach....................................................52 III. Confirmation and Ad Hoc Hypotheses....................................................53 IV. Michael Strevens’s Bayesian Account of Ad Hocness ............................57 V. The Bayesians versus Ptolemy....................................................................62 VI. The Bayesians versus the Lab-Break In Case and the Philosopher’s Ptolemy Case........................................................68 VII. A Divergence in Terminology from Both Howson and Urbach and Strevens and a Gesture to a Later Objection.................73 VIII. Ad Hocness Ought Not Be the Umbrella Term for Two Distinct Phenomena.................................................................................75 IX. Too Much Depends on Prior Probabilities...............................................78 IX. The Problem of Prior Probabilities for the Possible a’ s........................81 X. Conclusion.................................................................................................83 Chapter Three Jarrett Leplin’s Account of Ad Hocness: The Closest to Being Successful.................................................85 I. Jarrett Leplin’s Criteria of Ad Hocness.....................................................85 II. The 3rd and 5th Criteria..............................................................................87 III. The Puzzle of What ‘Satisfactory Solution’ Means in Leplin’s 5th Criterion..............................................................................95 IV. A Further Puzzle Concerning What Constitutes as Contributing to a Solution..........................................................................98 V. Leplin’s Account of Ad Hocness as Applied to the Ptolemy Example...................................................................................100 VI. Leplin’s Account as Applied to the Philosopher’s Ptolemy Case.............................................................................................108 VII: The Failure to Account for What Makes Ad Hocness a Vice..................110 vii VIII. Leplin’s Third Criterion is Misleading...................................................115 IX. Scientists Can’t Get Advice from the 5th Criterion...................................117 X. Why Determining when Problems Ought to Be Solved Together Appeals to the Degrees of Belief of Scientists.............................................121 XI. Completeness Versus Fundamentality and the Degrees of Belief of Scientists..................................................................................123 Chapter Four Sober, Forster and Hitchcock’s Failure to Properly Account for Ad Hocness..............................................................129 I. Simplicity and Curve-Fitting.......................................................................129 II. Ad Hocness and Its Correlation with Closeness-of-Fit.............................134 III. How to Evaluate Hypothesis Introductions According to Sober’s Account of Ad Hocness..........................................................139 IV. Whether, on Sober’s Account, a Model Ought to Be Modified At All.....................................................................................140 V. Sober Versus Ptolemy................................................................................141 VI. The Problem With Considering Ad Hocness a Comparative Characteristic...........................................................................................145 VII. Conclusion..............................................................................................150 CHAPTER 5 A New Account of Ad Hoc Acts….…………………………...152 I. What Can Be Ad Hoc, Revisited..................................................................152 II. A Rough Definition of Ad Hoc Acts...........................................................156 III. A More Detailed Definition of Ad Hocness..............................................158 IV. Why Arbitrariness is the Vice of Ad Hocness..........................................162 V. Examples of Non-Ad Hoc Acts.................................................................164 VI. What If The Evidence Itself is Rejected?..................................................167 VII. Vagueness is to be Embraced – Or, At Least, to be Accepted................169 viii VIII. How Can New Theories Ever Come To Fruition Without Committing Ad Hoc Acts?.........................................................172 IX. How Does My Account of Ad Hocness Decide the Ptolemaic Example?............................................................................175 X. A Final Illustration of the Ways in Which One Can Fail to Commit an Action Where the Charge of Ad Hocness Can Be Appropriate....................................................................................180 XI. The Philosopher’s Myth of Ptolemy and My Account of Ad Hocness...........................................................................................183 XII. ‘Something Must Have Happened’, or, Engineering Our Savior Hypothesis to Get Around the Entailment Requirement.............................................................................................187 XIII. But Doesn’t Ad Hocness Admit of Degrees?.........................................188 XIV. An Objection Concerning the Use of Objective Probability..................192 XV. A Further Objection Concerning Probabilities.......................................194 XVI. Is Neutrality Concerning the Meaning of Acceptance Still Possible?.........................................................................................196 XVII. A More Detailed Definition of X...........................................................199
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