We do not, in many real scientific examples, have any doubt that the falsehood of particular hypotheses is responsible for specific pieces of refuting evidence. This book shows why. It is widely believed in philosophy that nobody can claim that the verdicts of science are forced upon us by the effects of a physical world upon our sense organs and instruments. Quine and Duhem argued that we may refuse any empirical conclusion, by challenging the auxiliaries we use. No matter how theory-laden observation is, we can still tell the difference between the occurrence of an outcome of observation and its not happening. We can build evidence for significant auxiliaries beginning with these outcomes, then confirm our hypothesis from independent outcomes. So we cannot always blame a well-established auxiliary for a failure. Fault Tracing then shows how to play independently established hypotheses against each other to determine whether an arbitrary hypothesis needs to be altered in the light of (apparently) refuting evidence. It analyses real examples from natural science, as well as simpler cases. It argues that, when scientific theories have a structure that prevents them from using this method, the theory looks wrong, and is subject to serious criticism. This is a new, and potentially far-reaching, theory of empirical justification. weiterlesen