INTRODUCTION
During the history of science, controversies have emerged regarding the legitimacy of speculating in science. At the outset, I will understand speculating as introducing assumptions without knowing that there is evidence for those assumptions.
If there is evidence, the speculator does not know that. If there is no such evidence, the speculator may or may not know that. The speculator may even be introducing such assumptions implicitly without realizing that he is. In any of these cases (under certain conditions to be specified later), he is speculating. I will use the term “speculation” to refer both to the activity of speculating and to the product of that activity—i.e., the assumptions themselves. Which meaning is intended should be clear from the context. In this chapter, I propose to do three things: first, to clarify and expand the initial characterization of speculation just given; second, to ask whether and under what conditions speculating in science is a legitimate activity; and third, assuming that speculating is or can be legitimate, to consider how, if at all, speculations are to be evaluated. Although philosophers and scientists have expressed strong and conflicting opinions on the subject of the second task, little has been written about the other two, particularly the first.In section 2, I offer three examples of speculations from the history of physics. In section 3, I introduce three influential contrasting views about whether and when speculating is legitimate in science. In sections 4 through 10, I focus on the basic definitional question, attempting to show exactly how the concept of speculation can be defined using various concepts of evidence—my own and Bayesian ones. In section 11, I discuss and reject the three contrasting views about speculation presented in section 3. In sections 12 and 13, I defend a different view—a pragmatic one suggested by James Clerk Maxwell, one of the great speculators in physics, who had very interesting philosophical ideas about speculation.
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