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Eliminative Induction and Bayesian Confirmation Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Susan Vineberg
Susan Vineberg*
Affiliation:
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA
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Extract

In his recent book The Advancement of Science, Philip Kitcher endorses eliminative induction, or the view that confirmation of hypotheses proceeds by the elimination of alternatives. My intention here is to critically examine Kitcher's eliminativist view of confirmation, and his rejection of the widely held Bayesian position, according to which an hypothesis H is confirmed by evidence E just in case the probability of H conditional on E is greater than the simple unconditional probability of H [i.e. p(H/E) > p(H)]. Here, I will maintain that while there are aspects of the eliminative approach which Bayesianism must incorporate, as has been argued by John Earman, the eliminativism advocated by Kitcher is unsatisfactory. In addition, I will suggest that Kitcher's reasons for rejecting Bayesian confirmation theory are unconvincing and depend on an overly restrictive version of the position and that indeed Bayesianism has resources needed by an eliminativist account of confirmation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 257 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1996

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References

1 Kitcher, Philip The Advancement of Science (New York: Oxford University Press 1993)Google Scholar

2 Earman, John Bayes or Bust? (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1992)Google Scholar

3 For Kitcher, scientific progress is quite complex, often involving changes in language, background hypotheses, explanatory model, and methods of experimentation and analysis.

4 Of course, in practice it may not be possible to pare down the alternatives to one.

5 For a detailed discussion of the virtues of Bayesian confirmation theory, see Earman.

6 For details see Earman, or Salmon, Merrilee et al., Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1992)Google Scholar.

7 Clearly, Kitcher’ s brand of eliminativism differs from Bayesian confirmation theory, since Kitcher's approach does not suppose that probabilities are assigned to hypotheses. However, it could be suggested that confirmation in accordance with Bayesian theory does involve a kind of elimination of alternative theories. Of course on the Bayesian view, confirmation of H by evidence E would not necessarily involve strict elimination of an alternative hypothesis, but whenever the probability of H is increased, there must be a decrease in probability for some alternative to H, although the alternative theory could simply be not H. For a technical discussion of the sense in which Bayesian confirmation involves eliminative induction see Hawthorne, James ‘Bayesian Induction is Eliminative Induction,’ Philosophical Topics 21 (1993) 99–138CrossRefGoogle Scholar. What I deny is that the Bayesian conception of confirmation entails that for evidence E to confirm a theory T, E must deductively or probabilistically eliminate some explicitly formulated, non-trivial rival of T.

8 See Tversky, Amos and Kahneman, Daniel ‘Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,’ Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973) 207-32CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,’ Science 185 (1974) 1124-31; and Nisbett, Richard and Ross, Lee Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1980)Google Scholar.

9 See especially Leamer, Edward Sources of International Comparative Advantage: Theory and Evidence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1984)Google Scholar.

10 For details, see Jeffrey, Richard Probability and the Art of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kaplan, Mark ‘Bayesianism without the Black Box,’ Philosophy of Science 56 (1989) 48–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Lloyd, Elisabeth The Structure and Confirmation of Evolutionary Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994)Google Scholar