Let me pick up where I left off in “Neyman’s Nursery,” [built to house Giere's statistical papers-in-exile]--please see Oct. 22 post. The main goal of the discussion is to get us to exercise correctly our "will to understand power", if only little by little. One of the two surprising papers I came across the night our house was hit by lightening has the tantalizing title “The Problem of Inductive Inference” (Neyman 1955). It reveals a use of statistical tests strikingly different from the long-run behavior construal most associated with Neyman. Surprising too, Neyman is talking to none other than the logical positivist philosopher of confirmation, Rudof Carnap:
I am concerned with the term “degree of confirmation” introduced by Carnap. …We have seen that the application of the locally best one-sided test to the data … failed to reject the hypothesis [that the n observations come from a source in which the null hypothesis is true]. The question is: does this result “confirm” the hypothesis that H0 is true of the particular data set? (Neyman, pp 40-41).
Neyman continues:
The answer … depends very much on the exact meaning given to the words “confirmation,” “confidence,” etc. If one uses these words to describe one’s intuitive feeling of confidence in the hypothesis tested H0, then…. the attitude described is dangerous.… [T]he chance of detecting the presence [of discrepancy from the null], when only [n] observations are available, is extremely slim, even if [the discrepancy is present]. Therefore, the failure of the test to reject H0 cannot be reasonably considered as anything like a confirmation of H0. The situation would have been radically different if the power function [corresponding to a discrepancy of interest] were, for example, greater than 0.95.
The general conclusion is that it is a little rash to base one’s intuitive confidence in a given hypothesis on the fact that a test failed to reject this hypothesis. A more cautious attitude would be to form one’s intuitive opinion only after studying the power function of the test applied.
Let me pick up where I left off in “Neyman’s Nursery,” [built to house Giere's statistical papers-in-exile]--please see Oct. 22 post. The main goal of the discussion is to get us to exercise correctly our "will to understand power", if only little by little. One of the two surprising papers I came across the night our house was hit by lightening has the tantalizing title “The Problem of Inductive Inference” (Neyman 1955). It reveals a use of statistical tests strikingly different from the long-run behavior construal most associated with Neyman. Surprising too, Neyman is talking to none other than the logical positivist philosopher of confirmation, Rudof Carnap:
