Blackwell Reference Online

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To say that a body of information is evidence in favor of a hypothesis is to say that the hypothesis receives some degree of support or confirmation from that information. What sorts of information confirm what hypotheses is a question which has long been controversial; it was discussed as avidly three centuries ago as it is today, when, under the heading of “confirmation theory,” it is one of the central topics in contemporary philosophy of science. Its profound interest to philosophers is due to its intimate connection with the philosophical problem of induction , concerning what grounds, if any, observational data can give us for accepting as a basis for action and belief hypotheses whose content logically transcends the observational data. Presumably, if it could be shown that any such hypothesis is sufficiently well confirmed by the evidence, then that would be grounds for accepting it. If, then, it could be shown that observational evidence could confirm such a transcendent hypothesis at all, then that would go some way to solving the problem of induction. That the problem of finding sound criteria for the confirmation of hypotheses which transcend the evidence is nontrivial is brought out neatly in the following simple example, due to Nelson Goodman (1954) , although essentially the same point had been made earlier by Poincaré. Suppose h is the hypothesis that all emeralds ... log in or subscribe to read full text