Hypothetico-deductivism: incomplete but not hopeless

Abstract

Alleged counter-examples deployed in Park (2004) against the account of selective hypothetico deductive confirmation offered in Gemes (1998) are shown to be ineffective. Furthermore, the reservations expressed in Gemes (1998) and (1993) about hypothetico-deductivism are retracted and replaced with the conclusion that hypothetico-deductivism is a viable account of confirmation that captures much of the practice of working scientists. However, because it cannot capture cases of inference to the best explanation and cases of the observational confirmation of statistical hypotheses, it is concluded that hypothetico-deductivism cannot supply a complete theory of confirmation