Richard Dawid (SU), Trusting a Theory – The case for Meta-empirical assessment

Tuesday 5 Mar 2024, 11:15 → 12:15 Europe/Stockholm

Albano 3: 6228 - Mega (22 seats) (Albano Building 3)

The starting point of this talk are two seemingly entirely different cases of trust in physical theories. The first case is string theory, a theory developed for more than half a century that looks very promising to many of its exponents but has neither found quantitative empirical confirmation nor conceptual completion to date. The second case is the apparent measurement of superluminal neutrinos by OPERA in 2011, which was mostly disbelieved already at the time of its announcement due to very strong trust in the theory of special relativity. Though seemingly of entirely different nature, the two cases touch the same conceptual question about theory confirmation: on what basis does science generate trust in a theory’s predictions? In the first case, the question is how any trust in a theory can be generated in the absence of empirical confirmation. In the second case, the question is how trust in a theory can be so strong that even the most reputable experiment is being disbelieved if it contradicts the theory’s predictions. In the talk, I will explain why the canonical philosophical perspectives on theory confirmation fail to answer both questions. I will then argue that the two questions have the same conceptual answer, which is related to the concept of meta-empirical theory assessment.