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Bayesian Measures of Confirmation from Scoring Rules

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Steven J. van Enk
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Abstract

I show how scoring rules, interpreted as measuring the inaccuracy of a set of degrees of belief, may be exploited to construct confirmation measures as used in Bayesian confirmation theory. I construct two confirmation measures from two particular standard scoring rules. One of these measures is genuinely new, the second is trivially ordinally equivalent to the difference measure. These two measures are tested against three well-known measures of confirmation in a simple but illuminating case that contains in a natural way the problem of irrelevant conjunction. The genuinely new measure emerges, arguably, as the best.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 101 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I thank the anonymous referees for their very useful comments.

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