Achinstein and the Evidence for Evolution
Achinstein and the Evidence for Evolution
Peter Achinstein began his Book of Evidence with the claim that standard philosophical theories of evidence are and ought to be ignored by scientists. He could have gone further: historians of science should ignore standard philosophical theories of evidence as well. The problem is that these theories are prescriptive, formal, and a priori. Consequently, they are unable to help us understand what counted as evidence for actual scientists and they are insensitive to context, in particular to scientists’ beliefs about empirical facts. What historians of science need is, first, a descriptive concept of evidence that can help us understand when something was actually evidence for some person at some time; second, a prescriptive concept that is sensitive to context and empirical knowledge. Achinstein's framework gives us both: first, in his subjective concept of evidence, which is relativized to persons, and second, in his epistemic concept, which is relativized to context. These concepts can help us better understand complex historical cases such as Darwin's acceptance of branching evolution on the basis of the taxonomic facts, and his apparently conflicting views about whether these facts were evidentially sufficient.
Keywords: prescriptive concepts of evidence, descriptive concepts of evidence, induction, subjective evidence, epistemic situation evidence, Darwin, evolution, taxonomic facts
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
