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Likelihood and Consilience: On Forster’s Counterexamples to the Likelihood Theory of Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jiji Zhang  and
Kun Zhang
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Abstract

Forster presented some interesting examples having to do with distinguishing the direction of causal influence between two variables, which he argued are counterexamples to the likelihood theory of evidence. In this article, we refute Forster’s arguments by carefully examining one of the alleged counterexamples. We argue that the example is not convincing as it relies on dubious intuitions that likelihoodists have forcefully criticized. More important, we show that contrary to Forster’s contention, the consilience-based methodology he favored is accountable within the framework of the likelihood theory of evidence.

Type
Confirmation Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , December 2015 , pp. 930 - 940
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This research was supported in part by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong under the General Research Fund LU342213.

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