The subjectivity of scientists and the bayesian approach pdf

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The Subjectivity of Scientists and the Bayesian Approach. Wiley, New York, Woodward , P. Download PDF. Share Full Text for Free. Web of Science. Let us know here.

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Already have an account? Log in. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 2. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Sep 09, Ari rated it did not like it. This might be the worst book I have ever read about the history of philosophy of science.

The authors argue that science intrinsically relies on subjective judgments and that Bayesian reasoning lets us do this in a principled and rigorous way. They back this with biographical sketches of 12 great scientists selected by a previous author and 5 other more-controversial scientists. The first problem with this book is that the authors have an idiosyncratic and unhelpful definition of "subjective"; This might be the worst book I have ever read about the history of philosophy of science.

The first problem with this book is that the authors have an idiosyncratic and unhelpful definition of "subjective"; they define it as "preexisting views or beliefs about entities that influence the gathering of data or its interpretation.

The biographical sketches felt mostly redundant and in many places carelessly done. The authors refer to the Einstein letter about the atomic bomb, without mentioning that Einstein didn't write it.

Teller and Szilard did. They refer to Pasteur injecting people with his rabies vaccine. He didn't do the injections; he worked with a physician, who did the actual injection. The authors' references to past philosophers of science are painfully confused. They refer to "the Popperian approach of falsification, or setting up a straw man hypothesis believed to be false and then showing it is indeed false. This is a wildly distorted portrayal of Popper. One wonders if they have in fact read him; if not, they have no business writing about the scientific method, since his is basically the consensus view of most working scientists.

I cannot understand what view the authors are rebutting. The straw-vulcan view, where a scientist should mechanically deduce a hypothesis from data, test it in a straightforward way, and repeat, is one that I have never seen anybody advocate for. Everybody has always asserted that science is a creative, imaginative field, with a lot of guessing and exploring of hunches.

Objectivity matters because science aims to convince skeptical experts -- who might have different guesses. And those people have stories and guesses of their own and will only be swayed by math or empirical evidence. The point of objectivity is to convince skeptics, not to form hypotheses. To the extent that we exhort scientists to remain dispassionate and objective, it is precisely because everybody understands that the universal human tendency is otherwise.

But my biggest problem with the book was in the final chapter, on Bayesianism.