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Sober's Principle of Common Cause and The Problem of Comparing Incomplete Hypotheses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Malcolm R. Forster
Malcolm R. Forster*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of Wisconsin—Madison
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Abstract

Sober (1984) has considered the problem of determining the evidential support, in terms of likelihood, for a hypothesis that is incomplete in the sense of not providing a unique probability function over the event space in its domain. Causal hypotheses are typically like this because they do not specify the probability of their initial conditions. Sober's (1984) solution to this problem does not work, as will be shown by examining his own biological examples of common cause explanation. The proposed solution will lead to the conclusion, contra Sober, that common cause hypotheses explain statistical correlations and not matchings between event tokens.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 538 - 559
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am very grateful to Elliott Sober for extensive correspondence on these issues. Some crucial mistakes were corrected in an earlier draft, thanks to Nancy Cartwright. A substantial part of this work was carried out under a University Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Monash University, Australia.

References

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