Huber, Franz (2004) What Is the Point of Confirmation? In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

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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.

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Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Huber, Franz
Keywords:	confirmation, semantic information, theory evaluation
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Depositing User:	Franz Huber
Date Deposited:	01 Sep 2004
Last Modified:	07 Oct 2010 15:12
Item ID:	1924
Publisher:	Philosophy of Science Association
Public Domain:	No
Conference Date:	November 18-21, 2004
Conference Location:	Austin, Texas
Subjects:	General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Date:	2004
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/1924

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