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Confirmation Measures and Sensitivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Olav B. Vassend
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Abstract

Stanley Stevens draws a useful distinction among ordinal scales, interval scales, and ratio scales. Most recent discussions of confirmation measures have proceeded on the ordinal level of analysis. In this article, I give a more quantitative analysis. In particular, I show that the requirement that our desired confirmation measure be at least an interval measure naturally yields necessary conditions that jointly entail the log-likelihood measure. Thus, I conclude that the log-likelihood measure is the only good candidate interval (or ratio) measure.

Type
Confirmation Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , December 2015 , pp. 892 - 904
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Thanks to Michael Titelbaum and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback, and thanks to PSA participants (esp. Emi Okayasu and Greg Gandenberger) for stimulating discussion.

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