On the Predilections for Predictions

Scientific theories are developed in response to a certain set of phenomena and subsequently evaluated, at least partially, in terms of the quality of fit between those same theories and appropriately distinctive phenomena. To differentiate between these two stages it is popular to describe the former as involving the accommodation of data and the latter as involving the prediction of data. Predictivism is the view that, ceteris paribus, correctly predicting data confers greater confirmation than successfully accommodating data. In this paper, I take issue with a variety of predictivist theses, argue that their role for issues of confirmation is extremely limited, and attempt to account for the appeal that predictivism has enjoyed. 1. Introduction2. Temporal Predictivism3. Heuristic Predictivism4. Weak Predictivism4.1. Inference to better theories4.2. Inference to better methods5. Arguments for Strong Heuristic Predictivism5.1. Best explanations argument5.2. Conditional support5.3. Unique explanations6. Increased Explanatory Unification6.1. Explaining what other theories can't6.2. Contrived hypotheses6.2. Strength and simplicity7. Conclusions