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Does Evidential Variety Depend on How the Evidence Is Described?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Greg Novack
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Abstract

The Variety of Evidence Thesis (VET) says that (ceteris paribus) the more diverse (or varied) of two bodies of evidence is the more confirmatory of a hypothesis H. Two recent types of Bayesian explication of VET account for the intuitive force of VET by defining variety as some function of the probabilities of the propositions which collectively constitute a body of evidence. I show that these two accounts of VET are not tracking a meaningful property of bodies of evidence, but rather are tracking artifacts of how those bodies of evidence are described. According to each account, whether a body of evidence is more varied than another depends on how the bodies are split into parts. Furthermore, for each type of account there exists a way to redescribe the total evidence such that any two totalities are equally varied.

Type
Bayesian Epistemology
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 74 , Issue 5: Proceedings of the 2006 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers. Edited by Cristina Bicchieri and Jason Alexander , December 2007 , pp. 701 - 711
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Elliott Sober for comments on multiple drafts of this paper, and Malcolm Forster, John Koolage, and Joel Velasco for comments on a verbal delivery.

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