John W. Tukey as "philosopher"

Abstract

Although not a traditional philosopher, John Tukey contributed much to our understanding of statistical science and empirical science more broadly. The former is represented by the light he shed on the relation of drawing conclusions to making decisions, and of how simple concepts like significance and confidence serve to back up or "confirm" empirical findings. Less successfully, he attempted inconclusively to sort out the ambiguities of R. A. Fisher's fiducial argument. His main effort, however, went to creating "exploratory data analysis" or EDA as a subfieldof statistics with much to offer to ongoing developments in data mining and data visualization.