Across the Boundaries: Extrapolation in Biology and Social Science

摘要

The problem of extrapolation is of as much philosophical interest as it is of practical significance. We often cannot experiment directly on populations whose wellbeing we ultimately care about because of ethical, technological or financial constraints. When we cannot experiment directly on a population of interest and nevertheless seek experimental evidence about that population, we must experiment on a different but related population and infer what we want to know about the former from what we do know about the latter.