Final Considerations Against Robustness
Robert George Spencer Hudson · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2013
This chapter returns to the question of the philosophical justification of robustness, specifically, a discussion of the ‘core argument’ for robustness deferred from Chapter 1. As assisted by a reflection on the various case studies introduced in Chapters 2 through 5, it is explained how the core argument is unsuccessful due mainly to difficulties in interpreting what it means for observational procedures to be ‘independent’ in a way that supports the robustness insight. The philosophical critique of robustness is furthered by noting how the converse to robustness is wrongly disvalued by robustness theorists, how robustness fails to capture the value of corroborating witnesses in a forensics case, by showing the irrelevance to robustness to math and logic, and in exhibiting the lack of connection between the robustness of a result and its representational accuracy.