This note makes a contribution to the issue raised in a paper by Popper and Miller (1983) in which it was claimed that probabilistic support is purely deductive. Developing R. C. Jeffrey's remarks, a new general approach to the crucial concept of "going beyond" is here proposed. By means of it a quantitative measure of the inductive component of a probabilistic inference is reached. This proposal leads to vindicating the view that typical predictive probabilistic inferences by enumeration and analogy are (...) purely inductive. (shrink)

Maher (1988, 1990) has recently argued that the way a hypothesis is generated can affect its confirmation by the available evidence, and that Bayesian confirmation theory can explain this. In particular, he argues that evidence known at the time a theory was proposed does not confirm the theory as much as it would had that evidence been discovered after the theory was proposed. We examine Maher's arguments for this "predictivist" position and conclude that they do not, in fact, support his (...) view. We also cast doubt on the assumptions of Maher's alleged Bayesian proofs. (shrink)

In 1983, in an open letter to the journal Nature, Karl Popper and David Miller set forth a particularly strong critical argument which sought to demonstrate the impossibility of inductive probability. Since its publication the argument has faced many criticisms and we argue in this article that they do not reach their objectives. We will first reconstruct the demonstration made by Popper and Miller in their initial article and then try to evaluate the main arguments against it. Although it is (...) possible to conceptualize logically the idea of induction, it is shown that it is not possible on traditional Bayesian grounds. (shrink)