Evidential Support and Contraposition

Symmetry and Evidential Support

This article proves that formal theories of evidential favoring must fail because they are inevitably language dependent. I begin by describing Carnap’s early confirmation theories to show how language dependence problems (like Goodman’s grue problem) arise. I then generalize to show that any formal favoring theory satisfying minimal plausible conditions will yield different judgments about the...

Evidential Support and Instrumental Rationality

Bounded Support and Confidence over Evidential Databases

In this work, we propose a new definition of support and confidence measures based on interval representation. Moreover, a new algorithm, named EBS-Apriori, based on these bounded measures and several pruning strategies is developed. A new associative classifier, named WEvAC, based on fusion and weighting technique is implemented and tested. Experiments are conducted using several database benc...

An Anti-Reductionist’s Guide to Evidential Support

What sorts of properties should we use in building our conception of the way the world is? David Lewis offers one answer to this question; Robert Stalnaker offers another. Lewis suggests a reductionist picture, according to which we should strive to build our conception of the way the world is on the basis of fundamental (or ‘perfectly natural’) properties. Fundamental properties, according to ...

The evidential support theory of conditionals

According to so-called epistemic theories of conditionals, the assertability/ acceptability/acceptance of a conditional requires the existence of an epistemically significant relation between the conditional’s antecedent and its consequent. This paper points to some linguistic data that our current best theories of the foregoing type appear unable to explain. Further, it presents a new theory o...