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New Dimensions of Confirmation Theory II: The Structure of Uncertainty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

William W. Rozeboom*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta

Extract

You are, I am sure, just as aware as I am that the operational nodes of a complex problem, the points at which it can be split open to yield nuggets of new insight or achieve lasting advances, often lie in tediously technical details perhaps incomprehensible to all but specialists in the matter and anyways totally lacking in the romance and easy excitement which attract the topic's dilettantes. I would like you to hold fast to this appreciation, for the concerns I shall raise here are technical indeed. They are, however, seminal technicalities which, as we seek to fathom them, should fundamentally reshape our comprehension of the logic of confirmation, causal connectedness, and the foundations of statistical inference. In brief, it will be seen that certain powerful everyday intuitions concerning which propositions are confirmationally irrelevant to which others are exceedingly difficult to justify.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1970

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