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What Is the Point of Confirmation?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Franz Huber
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Abstract

Philosophically, one of the most important questions in the enterprise termed confirmation theory is this: Why should one stick to well confirmed theories rather than to any other theories? This paper discusses the answers to this question one gets from absolute and incremental Bayesian confirmation theory. According to absolute confirmation, one should accept “absolutely well confirmed” theories, because absolute confirmation takes one to true theories. An examination of two popular measures of incremental confirmation suggests the view that one should stick to incrementally well confirmed theories, because incremental confirmation takes one to (the most) informative (among all) true theories. However, incremental confirmation does not further this goal in general. I close by presenting a necessary and sufficient condition for revealing the confirmational structure in almost every world when presented separating data.

Type
Decision Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 72 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers , December 2005 , pp. 1146 - 1159
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I have benefited from discussions with Luc Bovens, Branden Fitelson, Jim Joyce, Sherri Roush, and Gerhard Schurz. My research was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Program for the Investment in the Future (ZIP) of the German Government through a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award.

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