The Shortcomings of Extra-Empirical Justifications for String Theory

The main goal of the thesis is to level counterarguments against Richard Dawid’s extra-empirical arguments for the scientificity of string theory. I will use the luminiferous aether as a parallel case study to show that if we were to accept Dawid’s extra-empirical arguments, an equally compelling case could have been made for the scientificity of Henri Poincaré’s aether theory—which has since been refuted. I also suggest that the lack of empirical corroboration of supersymmetry at the Large Hadron Collider undermines the trustworthiness of his meta-inductive argument in particular and that Dawid may be guilty in this argument of committing the base rate fallacy as identified in the Bayesian probability theory on which he relies. Furthermore, I argue that since there is a substantive difference between how Dawid’s extra-empirical arguments are used in the canonical scientific method and how he proposes to use them in support of string theory’s scientificity, the former cannot justify the latter. Lastly, I object to taking string theory’s final theory claims seriously since certainty of string theory’s scientific validity is their truth condition, and empirically or extra-empirically, this is unobtainable.