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Glymour has developed an account of the confirmation of scientific hypotheses which he advocates as an alternative to the hypothetico-deductive and Bayesian accounts. This account is subject to a counter-example which may be accomodated by a slight modification. So modified it describes an important dimension of confirmation. If the modification of Glymour's account is slightly extended, both the resulting account and the hypothetico-deductive account may be seen as special cases of a Bayesian theory which is immune to Glymour's criticisms.

This paper investigates the adequacy of evidential relevance relations proposed by Glymour and others. These accounts incorporate, as a necessary condition, what I call the Positive Instance Condition (PIC): the evidence statement and auxiliary assumptions entail a "positive instance" of the hypothesis. I argue that any account which incorporates PIC as a necessary condition while allowing "bootstrap testing" is doomed to fail. A nonbootstrapping evidential relevance relation of similar form is proposed, and it is argued that, in addition to avoiding (...) published counter examples, this new relation meets two general requirements which, if not met, would undermine the ability of any account that incorporates PIC to accord with our intuitions of evidential relevance. (shrink)

Glymour's "bootstrap" account of confirmation is designed to provide an analysis of evidential relevance, which has been a serious problem for hypothetico-deductivism. As set out in Theory and Evidence, however, the "bootstrap" condition allows confirmation in clear cases of evidential irrelevance. The difficulties with Glymour's account seem to be due to a basic feature which it shares with hypothetico-deductive accounts, and which may explain why neither can give a satisfactory analysis of evidential relevance.

An amended bootstrapping can avoid Christensen's counterexamples. Earman and Edidin argue that Christensen's examples to bootstrapping rely on his failure to analyze background knowledge. I add an additional condition to bootstrapping that is motivated by Glymour's remarks on variety of evidence. I argue that it avoids the problems that the examples raise. I defend the modification against the charge that it is holistic, and that it collapses into Bayesianism.