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Belief, Evidence, and UncertaintyThe Paradoxes of Confirmation

Belief, Evidence, and Uncertainty: The Paradoxes of Confirmation [It is easy to resolve a contradiction. All you have to do is reject or reconfigure one of the premises of the argument that leads to it. What makes paradoxes so difficult to resolve is that the assumptions that generate them are so intuitive that they resist rejection or reconfiguration. The “paradoxes of confirmation” have been especially difficult to resolve. As much is indicated by the vast literature to which they have given rise. The “raven” and “grue” paradoxes are associated with, and often thought to cause problems for, the so-called “positive instance” account of confirmation. The “old evidence” paradox arises in connection with traditional Bayesian accounts of confirmation and, in the minds of some, is a decisive objection to it. These two accounts differ in a number of important ways. What they share is the assumption that the notions of confirmation and evidence are inter-definable, an assumption so deeply embedded that it has altogether escaped notice. Our object in this chapter is to show, once again, why confirmation and evidence should be distinguished, this time because their conflation is one root of the paradoxes. The work done by many others on the paradoxes, much of it technical, has thrown a great deal of light on our inductive practices. In providing a unified, if admittedly rather general treatment of them, we hope to indicate a new direction for this work.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Belief, Evidence, and UncertaintyThe Paradoxes of Confirmation

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2016
ISBN
978-3-319-27770-7
Pages
125 –141
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-27772-1_9
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[It is easy to resolve a contradiction. All you have to do is reject or reconfigure one of the premises of the argument that leads to it. What makes paradoxes so difficult to resolve is that the assumptions that generate them are so intuitive that they resist rejection or reconfiguration. The “paradoxes of confirmation” have been especially difficult to resolve. As much is indicated by the vast literature to which they have given rise. The “raven” and “grue” paradoxes are associated with, and often thought to cause problems for, the so-called “positive instance” account of confirmation. The “old evidence” paradox arises in connection with traditional Bayesian accounts of confirmation and, in the minds of some, is a decisive objection to it. These two accounts differ in a number of important ways. What they share is the assumption that the notions of confirmation and evidence are inter-definable, an assumption so deeply embedded that it has altogether escaped notice. Our object in this chapter is to show, once again, why confirmation and evidence should be distinguished, this time because their conflation is one root of the paradoxes. The work done by many others on the paradoxes, much of it technical, has thrown a great deal of light on our inductive practices. In providing a unified, if admittedly rather general treatment of them, we hope to indicate a new direction for this work.]

Published: Mar 5, 2016

Keywords: Positive instance account of confirmation; Raven paradox; Grue paradox; Old evidence paradox

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