He’s likely referring to the fact that the rules of probabilistic reasoning can be shown to be the only rules of reasoning that yield correct inferences from data. Bayesian statistics is in that sense the “logic of science”. The first chapter of E.T. Jaynes’s book with that subtitle [0] is a good introduction to these ideas if you haven’t seen them before.
As a matter of fact, Jaynes is a good reference even though I didn't have him in mind at the time. I was more referring to the general impression I get reading a lot of statistics textbooks and papers, which is that they're trying to numerically formalize methodologies appropriate to experimental sciences. You end up with a fair amount of papers co-written between phil-of-science scholars and statisticians.
Comments
'Statistics is formalized philosophy of science' -- care to expand? Or provide supplementary literature?
He’s likely referring to the fact that the rules of probabilistic reasoning can be shown to be the only rules of reasoning that yield correct inferences from data. Bayesian statistics is in that sense the “logic of science”. The first chapter of E.T. Jaynes’s book with that subtitle [0] is a good introduction to these ideas if you haven’t seen them before.
0. E.T. Jaynes (2003), “Probability Theory: the Logic of Science,” http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf [PDF]
As a matter of fact, Jaynes is a good reference even though I didn't have him in mind at the time. I was more referring to the general impression I get reading a lot of statistics textbooks and papers, which is that they're trying to numerically formalize methodologies appropriate to experimental sciences. You end up with a fair amount of papers co-written between phil-of-science scholars and statisticians.