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Tracking Confirmation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Igor Douven
Igor Douven*
Affiliation:
To contact the author, please write to: IHPST,13 rue du Four, 75006 Paris, France; e-mail: igor.douven@univ-paris1.fr.
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Abstract

Confirmation is a graded notion: evidence can confirm a hypothesis to a greater or lesser degree. There has been debate about how to measure degree of confirmation. Starting from the observation that we would like evidence to be a discriminating indicator of truth, we conduct computer simulations to determine how well the various known measures of confirmation predict the extent to which a given piece of evidence fulfills that role, given a hypothesis of interest. The outcomes show that some measures are markedly better indicators of truth than others.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 398 - 414
Copyright
Copyright 2021 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

†

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments, which greatly helped to improve this article. The Julia code for the simulations reported in this article can be downloaded from https://github.com/IgorDouven/Tracking.

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