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EVIDENTIAL SUPPORT, TRANSITIVITY, AND SCREENING-OFF

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2015

WILLIAM ROCHE
WILLIAM ROCHE*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Texas Christian University
*
*DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY 2800 S. UNIVERSITY DR. FORT WORTH, TX 76129 USA E-mail:[email protected] home page: https://sites.google.com/site/philowroche/
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Abstract

Is evidential support transitive? The answer is negative when evidential support is understood as confirmation so that X evidentially supports Y if and only if p(Y | X) > p(Y). I call evidential support so understood “support” (for short) and set out three alternative ways of understanding evidential support: support-t (support plus a sufficiently high probability), support-t* (support plus a substantial degree of support), and support-tt* (support plus both a sufficiently high probability and a substantial degree of support). I also set out two screening-off conditions (under which support is transitive): SOC1 and SOC2. It has already been shown that support-t is non-transitive in the general case (where it is not required that SOC1 holds and it is not required that SOC2 holds), in the special case where SOC1 holds, and in the special case where SOC2 holds. I introduce two rather weak adequacy conditions on support measures and argue that on any support measure meeting those conditions it follows that neither support-t* nor support-tt* is transitive in the general case, in the special case where SOC1 holds, or in the special case where SOC2 holds. I then relate some of the results to Douven’s evidential support theory of conditionals along with a few rival theories.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 785 - 806
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2015 

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