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Beyond Bootstrapping: A New Account of Evidential Relevance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Madison Culler
Madison Culler*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University
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Abstract

This paper investigates the adequacy of evidential relevance relations proposed by Glymour and others. These accounts incorporate, as a necessary condition, what I call the Positive Instance Condition (PIC): the evidence statement and auxiliary assumptions entail a “positive instance” of the hypothesis. I argue that any account which incorporates PIC as a necessary condition while allowing “bootstrap testing” is doomed to fail. A nonbootstrapping evidential relevance relation of similar form is proposed, and it is argued that, in addition to avoiding published counter examples, this new relation meets two general requirements which, if not met, would undermine the ability of any account that incorporates PIC to accord with our intuitions of evidential relevance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 62 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 561 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1995

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Clark Glymour, Wesley Salmon, and especially John Earman for their time and helpful comments. Also, thanks to Ken Manders for reading over proofs of Lemmas 1 and 2.

‡

Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, Northern Arizona University, Box 6011, Flagstaff, AZ 86011.

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