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  1. (1 other version)Confirmation, transitivity, and Moore: the Screening-Off Approach.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (3):797-817.
    It is well known that the probabilistic relation of confirmation is not transitive in that even if E confirms H1 and H1 confirms H2, E may not confirm H2. In this paper we distinguish four senses of confirmation and examine additional conditions under which confirmation in different senses becomes transitive. We conduct this examination both in the general case where H1 confirms H2 and in the special case where H1 also logically entails H2. Based on these analyses, we argue that (...)
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  • Absence of evidence and evidence of absence: evidential transitivity in connection with fossils, fishing, fine-tuning, and firing squads.Elliott Sober - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 143 (1):63-90.
    “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” is a slogan that is popular among scientists and nonscientists alike. This article assesses its truth by using a probabilistic tool, the Law of Likelihood. Qualitative questions (“Is E evidence about H ?”) and quantitative questions (“How much evidence does E provide about H ?”) are both considered. The article discusses the example of fossil intermediates. If finding a fossil that is phenotypically intermediate between two extant species provides evidence that those species have (...)
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  • Warranted Christian Belief.Alvin Plantinga - 2000 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, thus, (...)
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  • The Problem of Measure Sensitivity Redux.Peter Brössel - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (3):378-397.
    Fitelson (1999) demonstrates that the validity of various arguments within Bayesian confirmation theory depends on which confirmation measure is adopted. The present paper adds to the results set out in Fitelson (1999), expanding on them in two principal respects. First, it considers more confirmation measures. Second, it shows that there are important arguments within Bayesian confirmation theory and that there is no confirmation measure that renders them all valid. Finally, the paper reviews the ramifications that this "strengthened problem of measure (...)
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  • (1 other version)Confirmation, transitivity, and Moore: the Screening-Off Approach.William Roche & Tomoji Shogenji - 2013 - Philosophical Studies (3):1-21.
    It is well known that the probabilistic relation of confirmation is not transitive in that even if E confirms H1 and H1 confirms H2, E may not confirm H2. In this paper we distinguish four senses of confirmation and examine additional conditions under which confirmation in different senses becomes transitive. We conduct this examination both in the general case where H1 confirms H2 and in the special case where H1 also logically entails H2. Based on these analyses, we argue that (...)
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  • Transitivity and Intransitivity in Evidential Support: Some Further Results.William Roche - 2012 - Review of Symbolic Logic 5 (2):259-268.
    Igor Douven establishes several new intransitivity results concerning evidential support. I add to Douven’s very instructive discussion by establishing two further intransitivity results and a transitivity result.
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  • A weaker condition for transitivity in probabilistic support.William A. Roche - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (1):111-118.
    Probabilistic support is not transitive. There are cases in which x probabilistically supports y , i.e., Pr( y | x ) > Pr( y ), y , in turn, probabilistically supports z , and yet it is not the case that x probabilistically supports z . Tomoji Shogenji, though, establishes a condition for transitivity in probabilistic support, that is, a condition such that, for any x , y , and z , if Pr( y | x ) > Pr( y (...)
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  • Natural Theology, Its “Dwindling Probabilities” and “Lack of Rapport”.Richard Swinburne - 2004 - Faith and Philosophy 21 (4):533-546.
    This paper comments on the other papers in this special issue of ’Faith and Philosophy’ on natural theology. It claims that most people today need both bare natural theology (to show that there is a God) and ramified natural theology (to establish detailed doctrinal claims), and that Christian tradition has generally claimed that cogent arguments of natural theology (of both kinds) are available. Plantinga’s "dwindling probabilities" objection against ramified natural theology is shown to have no force when different pieces of (...)
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  • The degree of epistemic justification and the conjunction fallacy.Tomoji Shogenji - 2012 - Synthese 184 (1):29-48.
    This paper describes a formal measure of epistemic justification motivated by the dual goal of cognition, which is to increase true beliefs and reduce false beliefs. From this perspective the degree of epistemic justification should not be the conditional probability of the proposition given the evidence, as it is commonly thought. It should be determined instead by the combination of the conditional probability and the prior probability. This is also true of the degree of incremental confirmation, and I argue that (...)
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  • Bayes' theorem.James Joyce - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Bayes' Theorem is a simple mathematical formula used for calculating conditional probabilities. It figures prominently in subjectivist or Bayesian approaches to epistemology, statistics, and inductive logic. Subjectivists, who maintain that rational belief is governed by the laws of probability, lean heavily on conditional probabilities in their theories of evidence and their models of empirical learning. Bayes' Theorem is central to these enterprises both because it simplifies the calculation of conditional probabilities and because it clarifies significant features of subjectivist position. Indeed, (...)
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  • The plurality of bayesian measures of confirmation and the problem of measure sensitivity.Branden Fitelson - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):378.
    Contemporary Bayesian confirmation theorists measure degree of (incremental) confirmation using a variety of non-equivalent relevance measures. As a result, a great many of the arguments surrounding quantitative Bayesian confirmation theory are implicitly sensitive to choice of measure of confirmation. Such arguments are enthymematic, since they tacitly presuppose that certain relevance measures should be used (for various purposes) rather than other relevance measures that have been proposed and defended in the philosophical literature. I present a survey of this pervasive class of (...)
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  • Warranted Christian Belief.Alvin Plantinga - 2000 - Philosophia Christi 3 (2):327-328.
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  • (1 other version)The Logical Foundations of Probability. [REVIEW]Rudolf Carnap - 1950 - Journal of Philosophy 60 (13):362-364.
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  • Time and Knowability in Evolutionary Processes.Elliott Sober & Mike Steel - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (4):558-579.
    Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. Markov chain theory entails that the passage of time reduces the amount of information that the present provides about the past. Here we use a Moran process framework to show that some evolutionary processes destroy information faster than others. Our results connect with Darwin’s principle that adaptive similarities provide scant evidence of common ancestry whereas neutral and deleterious similarities do better. (...)
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  • Responses to Fitelson, Sansom, and Sarkar. [REVIEW]Elliott Sober - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3):692-704.
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  • Has Plantinga Refuted the Historical Argument?Timothy McGrew - 2004 - Philosophia Christi 6 (1):7-26.
    On a subject that hath been so often treated, ’tis impossible to avoid saying many things which have been said before. It may, however, with reason be affirmed, that there still remains, on this subject, great scope for new observations. Besides, it ought to be remember’d, that the evidence of any complex argument depends very much on the order into which the material circumstances are digested, and the manner in which they are display’d.
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  • (1 other version)Logical Foundations of Probability (2nd edition).Rudolf Carnap - 1962 - Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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  • Further results on the intransitivity of evidential support.Igor Douven - 2011 - Review of Symbolic Logic 4 (4):487-497.
    It is known that evidential support, on the Bayesian definition of this notion, is intransitive. According to some, however, the Bayesian definition is too weak to be materially adequate. This paper investigates whether evidential support is transitive on some plausible probabilistic strengthening of that definition. It is shown that the answer is negative. In fact, it will appear that even under conditions under which the Bayesian notion of evidential support is transitive, the most plausible candidate strengthenings are not.
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  • Favoring, Likelihoodism, and Bayesianism. [REVIEW]Branden Fitelson - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3):666-672.
    This (brief) note is about the (evidential) “favoring” relation. Pre-theoretically, favoring is a three-place (epistemic) relation, between an evidential proposition E and two hypotheses H1 and H2. Favoring relations are expressed via locutions of the form: E favors H1 over H2. Strictly speaking, favoring should really be thought of as a four-place relation, between E, H1, H2, and a corpus of background evidence K. But, for present purposes (which won't address issues involving K), I will suppress the background corpus, so (...)
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  • .R. G. Swinburne - 1989 - Cambridge University Press.
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  • (1 other version)Logical Foundations of Probability.Rudolf Carnap - 1950 - Mind 62 (245):86-99.
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  • Historical Arguments and Dwindling Probabilities.Alvin Plantinga - 2006 - Philosophia Christi 8 (1):7-22.
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  • (1 other version)Warranted Christian Belief.P. Helm - 2001 - Mind 110 (440):1110-1115.
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  • (1 other version)Symmetries and asymmetries in evidential support.Ellery Eells & Branden Fitelson - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 107 (2):129 - 142.
    Several forms of symmetry in degrees of evidential support areconsidered. Some of these symmetries are shown not to hold in general. This has implications for the adequacy of many measures of degree ofevidential support that have been proposed and defended in the philosophical literature.
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  • A condition for transitivity in probabilistic support.Tomoji Shogenji - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (4):613-616.
    It is well known that probabilistic support is not transitive. But it can be shown that probabilistic support is transitive provided the intermediary proposition screens off the original evidence with respect to the hypothesis in question. This has the consequence that probabilistic support is transitive when the original evidence is testimonial, memorial or perceptual (i.e., to the effect that such and such was testified to, remembered, or perceived), and the intermediary proposition is its representational content (i.e., to the effect that (...)
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  • On bayesian measures of evidential support: Theoretical and empirical issues.Vincenzo Crupi, Katya Tentori & and Michel Gonzalez - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (2):229-252.
    Epistemologists and philosophers of science have often attempted to express formally the impact of a piece of evidence on the credibility of a hypothesis. In this paper we will focus on the Bayesian approach to evidential support. We will propose a new formal treatment of the notion of degree of confirmation and we will argue that it overcomes some limitations of the currently available approaches on two grounds: (i) a theoretical analysis of the confirmation relation seen as an extension of (...)
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  • Likelihoodism, Bayesianism, and relational confirmation.Branden Fitelson - 2007 - Synthese 156 (3):473-489.
    Likelihoodists and Bayesians seem to have a fundamental disagreement about the proper probabilistic explication of relational (or contrastive) conceptions of evidential support (or confirmation). In this paper, I will survey some recent arguments and results in this area, with an eye toward pinpointing the nexus of the dispute. This will lead, first, to an important shift in the way the debate has been couched, and, second, to an alternative explication of relational support, which is in some sense a "middle way" (...)
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  • Bayesian confirmation.Roberto Festa - 1999 - In M. C. Galavotti & A. Pagnini (eds.), Experience, Reality, and Scientific Explanation. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 55–87.
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