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On the Use of Likelihood as a Guide to Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Steven Orla Kimbrough
Steven Orla Kimbrough*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Extract

Much work in confirmation theory is directed towards finding or interpreting a function, c, taking on hypotheses and evidence as its arguments and returning a value by which the degree of support of the evidence for the hypothesis can be assessed. Confirmation functions are generally thought of as probability functions. That is, c(H,E) is thought to obey the axioms of probability theory, where H is an hypothesis and E the evidence being considered. A difficulty with this approach is that the various problems of induction, including Hume's and Goodman's, militate against construing any confirmation function as a probability function. To date, no satisfactory probability function has been found which addresses the general problem of ampliative inference and which is immune to the standard objections of the Humean or Goodmanian type.

These sorts of considerations suggest it would be promising to examine, as candidates for an acceptable confirmation function, functions which are not probability functions.

Type
Part IV. Statistics, Probability and Likelihood
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 117 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Fred Dretske and Stephen Vincent for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References

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