Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T18:17:26.446Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Giving up Certainties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Henry E. Kyburg Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

People have worried for many years — centuries — about how you perform large changes in your body of beliefs. How does the new evidence lead you to replace a geocentric system of planetary motion by a heliocentric system? How do we decide to abandon the principle of the conservation of mass?

The general approach that we will try to defend here is that an assumption, presupposition, framework principle, will be rejected or altered when a large enough number of improbabilities must be accepted on be basis of our experience. If I think that all swans are white, and a student claims to have a counterexample, I will assume that he has made some observational error. I will reject his result, and continue to accept the generalization. When a lot of people claim to have seen counterexamples, I will come around: to continue to accept the generalization would require me to accept too many improbabilities.

Type
Part VIII. Statistical Inference and Theory Change
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1991

Footnotes

1

Research on which this work is based was supported by the Signals Warfare Center of the United States Army.

References

Alchourron, C.E., Gardenfors, P., and Makinson, D. (1985), “On the Logic of Theory Change: Partial Meet Functions for Contraction and Revision,Journal of Symbolic Logic 50:510530.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alchourron, C.E., Gardenfors, P., and Makinson, D. (1982), “On the Logic of Theory Change: Contraction Functions and Their Associated Revision Functions,Theoria 48:1437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carnap, R. (1950), The Logical Foundations of Probability, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Fisher, R.A. (1956), Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference, Hafner Publishing Co, New York.Google Scholar
Gardenfors, P. (1986), “The Dynamics of Belief: Contractions and Revisions of Probability Functions,Topoi 5:2937.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardenfors, P. (1986), “The Dynamics of Belief: Contractions and Revisions of Probability Functions,Topoi 5:2937.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardenfors, P. and Makinson, D. (1988), “Revisions of Knowledge Systems Using Epistemic Entrenchment,Proceedings of the Second Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge, Vardi, M. (ed) Kaufman, Morgan, Los Altos: 8395.Google Scholar
Harman, G. (1989), Change in View, Bradford Books, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Jeffrey, R.C. (1965), The Logic of Decision, McGraw-Hill, New York.Google Scholar
Kyburg, H.E. Jr. (1963), “A Further Note on Rationality and Consistency,Journal of Philosophy 60:463465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kyburg, H.E. Jr. (1988), “Full Belief,Theory and Decision 25:137162.Google Scholar
Kyburg, H.E. Jr. (1961), Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Ct.Google Scholar
Kyburg, H.E. Jr. (1990), Science and Reason, Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kyburg, H.E. Jr. (1974), The Logical Foundations of Statistical Inference, Reidel, Dordrecht.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kyburg, H.E. Jr. (1984), Theory and Measurement, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Levi, I. (1967), Gambling with Truth, Knopf, New York.Google Scholar
Levi, I. (1980), The Enterprise of Knowledge, MIT Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Popper, K.R. (1959), The Logic of Scientific Discovery , Hutchinson and Co., London. First German Ed. 1934.Google Scholar
Spohn, W. (1987), “Ordinal Conditional Functions: A Dynamic Theory of Epistemic States,” in Causation in Decision, Belief Change, and Statistics, Harper, W. and Skyrms, B. (eds) Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 105134.Google Scholar