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)

The main appeal of the currently popular "bootstrap" account of confirmation developed by Clark Glymour is that it seems to provide an account of evidential relevance. This account has, however, had severe problems; and Glymour has revised his original account in an attempt to solve them. I argue that this attempt fails completely, and that any similar modifications must also fail. If the problems can be solved, it will only be by radical revisions which involve jettisoning bootstrapping's basic approach to (...) theories. Finally, I argue that there is little reason to think that even such drastic modifications will lead to a satisfactory account of 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.

Clark Glymour defined bootstrap-confirmation as a three-place relation: “Evidence E bootstrap confirms hypothesis H with respect to theory T.“ By an ingenious choice of examples, David Christensen has shown that Glymour's definition is satisfied in a class of cases in which confirmation seems to be highly counterintuitive. Responding to Christensen's criticism, Glymour revised his 1980 definition of bootstrap confirmation, by introducing an additional condition that rules out Christensen's counterexamples.

In Gemes (1990) I examined certain formal versions of hypothetico-deductivism (H-D) showing that they have the unacceptable consequence that "Abe is a white raven" confirms "All ravens are black"! In Gemes (1992) I developed a new notion of content that could save H-D from this bizarre consequence. In this paper, I argue that more traditional formulations of H-D also need recourse to this new notion of content. I present a new account of the vexing notion of the natural axiomatization of (...) a theory. The notion is used to construct a form of H-D that allows for the type of selective confirmation without which Glymour (1980a,b) claims H-D is hopeless. (shrink)

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Christensen [Philosophy of Science, 50: 471–481, 1983] and [Philosophy of Science, 57: 644–662, 1990] provides two sets of counter-examples to the versions of bootstrap confirmation for standard first-order languages presented in Glymour [Theory and Evidence, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1980] and [Philosophy of Science, 50: 626–629, 1983]. This paper responds to the counter-examples of Christensen [Philosophy of Science, 50: 471–481, 1983] by utilizing a new notion of content introduced in Gemes [Journal of Philosophical Logic, 26, 449–476, 1997]. It is claimed (...) that this response is better motivated and more effective than that presented in Glymour [Philosophy of Science, 50: 626–629, 1983]. It is then argued that while this response meets some of the counter-examples of Christensen [Philosophy of Science, 57: 644–662, 1990] two of those counter-examples, though not unanswerable, suggest the need for a substantial reformulation of the formal versions of bootstrapping. The essay proceeds with such a reformulation, arguing that this new formulation better fits the philosophical insights that originally motivated bootstrapping than do Glymour’s earlier formulations. In the concluding sections some alternative solutions to the problem posed by the Christensen counter-examples are discussed. (shrink)