Search

Scientific articles exemplify standard functional units constraining argumentative structures. Severe space limitations demand every paragraph and illustration contribute to establishing the paper's claims. Philosophical testing and confirmation models should take into account each paragraph, table, and illustration. Hypothetico-Deductive, Bayesian Inductive, and Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation models do not, garbling the logic of papers. Micro-analysis of the fundamental paper in plate tectonics reveals an argumentative structure commonplace in science but ignored by standard philosophical accounts that cannot be dismissed as mere rhetorical embellishment. Papers with illustrations often display a second argumentative structure differing from the text's. Constraints on adequate testing and confirmation analyses are adduced.“Experiments are about the assembly of persuasive arguments, ones that will stand up in court. … The task at hand is to capture the building-up of a persuasive argument about the world even in the absence of the logician's certainty.”—Galison, How Experiments End, 277.

On the basis of an analysis of a single paper on plate tectonics, a paper whose actual content is nowhere in evidence, Frederick Suppe concludes that no standard model of confirmation-hypotheticodeductive, Bayesian-inductive, or inference to the best explanationcan account for the structure of a scientific paper that reports an experimental result. He further argues on the basis of a survey of scientific papers, a survey whose data and results are also absent, that papers which have a rather stringent length limit, such as the one on plate tectonics, are typical of science. Thus, he concludes that no standard confirmation scheme is capable of dealing with scientific practice. Suppe also requires that an adequate model of philosophical testing should be able to account for everything in such scientific papers, in which space is at a premium. In the discussion below, we shall discuss only whether Suppe's argument holds against the Bayesian confirmation theory we favor. We leave it to adherents of the other views to defend themselves. We agree that Suppe's model of a paper is an adequate model of a certain type of short experimental paper, those published in letters journals or other journals such as Science or Nature. The question, however, is whether Bayesian confirmation theory can account for the structure of the argument offered in the paper. We believe that it can and does. Let us note, to begin with, that Suppe's account conflates, or at least