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Belief and the Incremental Confirmation of One Hypothesis Relative to Another

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Andre Mirabelli
Andre Mirabelli*
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Extract

I will present a theory of confirmation (support or corroboration) which can be considered both an extension of the work of Ian Hacking on support and of Karl Popper on corroboration. However, it will be clear that my theory is not a “mere conjunction of these two theories” (p. 202) but a formally simple and intuitive synthesis that explains their strengths and corrects their weaknesses.

Popper's explication of corroboration relies on the expression P(e,h) - P(e)2 normalized in different ways (p. 410). He goes on to state the following additional criteria for the corroboration of h by e: (a) we can only “rationally justify a preference for one theory out of a set of competing theories…. so far proposed” (p. 82); (b) e must be the result of a severe test (pp. 414, 418); (c) more-falsifiable hypotheses must be preferred (p. 41); (d) if h is a probabilistic hypothesis then e can only be a statistically interpreted finding, and thus e is often not allowed to be the total available evidence (p. 413).

Type
Part VIII. Applications of Statistical Ideas
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1978 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1978 , 1978 , pp. 287 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Joel Minsky and Philip Mirabelli for the discussion in May 1976 that led to whatever new ideas are contained here, Abner Shimony and Michael Meyer for their help and encouragement, and all my friends, especially W.N., J.P., E.M., B.J.S., R.S., D.C., and T.O., who endured ravens for so long.

References

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Hacking, I. Logic of Statistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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