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Comment by Bob_Unwin7 on When Science Can't Help · 2008-05-15T23:07:12.000Z · LW · GW

"I say again: name one concrete scientific process that does something Bayes can't."

Bayes does not explain the development of new concepts and conceptual schemes, and yet this is one important thing that the best scientists are able to do. I'm thinking of scientific revolutions in physics and biology especially, but there are many other examples (e.g. theoretical computer science, statistics, game theory, information theory, and--going back further--the notion of a mathematical proof). AFAIK, we don't have a good understand of conceptual development. We don't know how scientists do it (how 'conceptual revolutions' originate) and we don't know children do it. That is, we don't know how children develop the process of a precise natural number, or of a non-factive intentional state like a belief, or of moral vs. conventional rules.

Even excluding conceptual development (which Bayes says basically nothing about), there is still much in the logic of science that isn't explained by Bayes. You presumably aren't aware of this work because you haven't looked in any systematic way at the literature of this topic. For a starting point with a good set of references, see this paper by Glymour and Kelly, both of whom have studied Bayesian methods in technical depth in their work.

http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy/kelly/papers/Ch4-Glymour%20&%20Kelly-final.pdf