Convergence to the Truth

The epistemology of scientific inference has a rich history. According to the explanationist tradition, theory choice should be guided by a theory's overall balance of explanatory virtues, such as simplicity, fit with data, and/or unification (Russell 1912). The instrumentalist tradition urges, instead, that scientific inference should be driven by the goal of obtaining useful models, rather than true theories or even approximately true ones (Duhem 1906). A third tradition is Bayesianism, which features a shift of focus from all-ornothing beliefs to degrees of belief (Bayes 1763). It may be fair to say that these traditions are the big three in contemporary epistemology of scientific inference. There is, in fact, a fourth tradition.