Unification and Abductive Confirmation

Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 43:151-156 (2008)
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Abstract

According to the traditional requirement, formulated already by William Whewell in his account of the “consilience of inductions” in 1840, an explanatory scientific theory should be independently testable by new kinds of phenomena. A good theory should have unifying power in the sense that it explains and predicts several mutually independent phenomena. This paper studies the prospects of Bayesianism to motivate this kind of unification criterion for abductive confirmation.

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Ilkka Niiniluoto
University of Helsinki

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