Where Do Theories Come From?

This book presents a theory of theory building and testing that builds on insights in Lipton’s 2004 book Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). The new theory, called IBET (short for Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation Theory of theory building and testing), is presented and compared to three rival theories from the social sciences in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 discusses various philosophical issues and underpinnings of IBET, including sections on induction, abduction, causality, and differences between the Philosophy of Science and Social Science literatures on theory building. Chapter 3 presents details and test results from a qualitative empirical test of IBET that examined 41 cases of theory building and testing by recent Nobel prize-winners, 15 from Economics and 26 from Physics. The conclusions were that (a) there was very strong support for IBET, and (b) this support probably generalizes to all theory building in both Economics and Physics, and (with less confidence) to all scientific theory building. Then, since Salmon’s criticism of Lipton’s claims about the merits of IBE poses a major threat to IBET, Chapter 4 presents a possible behavioural explanation and reconciliation of Salmon’s and Lipton’s conflicting views on IBE. Finally, Chapter 5 illustrates many of the issues discussed in the book by presenting a detailed example of one of the author’s attempts at theory building.