Blackwell Publishing Forthcoming In Contemporary Debates In The Philosophy Of Science Ed Christopher Hitchcock Probability Captures The Logic布莱克韦尔出版社即将出现在科学哲学的当代辩论中克里斯托弗·希区柯克概率捕捉逻辑.pdf

PROBABILITY CAPTURES THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC CONFIRMATION 1. Introduction ‘Confirmation’ is a word in ordinary language and, like many such words, its meaning is vague and perhaps also ambiguous. So if we think of a logic of confirmation as a specification of precise rules that govern the word ‘confirmation’ in ordinary language, there can be no logic of confirmation. There can, however, be a different kind of logic of con- firmation. This can be developed using the philosophical methodology known as explication (Carnap, 1950, ch. 1). In this methodology, we are given an unclear concept of ordinary language (called the explican- dum) and our task is to find a precise concept (called the explicatum) that is similar to the explicandum and is theoretically fruitful and simple. Since the choice of an explicatum involves several desiderata, which different people may interpret and weight differently, there is not one “right” explication; different people may choose different explicata without either having made a mistake. Nevertheless, we can cite reasons that motivate us to choose one explicatum over another. In this paper I will define a predicate ‘C ’ which is intended to be an explicatum for confirmation. I will establish a variety of results about ‘C ’ dealing with verified consequences, reasoning by analogy, universal generalizations, Nicod’s condition, the ravens paradox, and projectability. We will find that these results correspond well with intuitive judgments about confirmation, thus showing that our expli- catum has the desired properties of being similar to its explicandum and theoretically fruitful. In this way we will develop parts of a logic of confirmation. The predicate ‘C ’ will be defined in terms of probability and in that sense we will con