Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis
According to a widespread but implicit thesis in Bayesian confirmation theory, two confirmation measures are considered equivalent if they are ordinally equivalent—call this the “ordinal equivalence thesis” (OET). I argue that adopting OET has significant costs. First, adopting OET renders one incap...
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
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2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148744 |
| _version_ | 1826118859597283328 |
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| author | Vassend, Olav B. |
| author2 | School of Humanities |
| author_facet | School of Humanities Vassend, Olav B. |
| author_sort | Vassend, Olav B. |
| collection | NTU |
| description | According to a widespread but implicit thesis in Bayesian confirmation theory, two confirmation measures are considered equivalent if they are ordinally equivalent—call this the “ordinal equivalence thesis” (OET). I argue that adopting OET has significant costs. First, adopting OET renders one incapable of determining whether a piece of evidence substantially favors one hypothesis over another. Second, OET must be rejected if merely ordinal conclusions are to be drawn from the expected value of a confirmation measure. Furthermore, several arguments and applications of confirmation measures given in the literature already rely on a rejection of OET. I also contrast OET with stronger equivalence theses and show that they do not have the same costs as OET. On the other hand, adopting a thesis stronger than OET has costs of its own, since a rejection of OET ostensibly implies that people’s epistemic states have a very fine-grained quantitative structure. However, I suggest that the normative upshot of the paper in fact has a conditional form, and that other Bayesian norms can also fruitfully be construed as having a similar conditional form. |
| first_indexed | 2024-10-01T04:50:25Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | ntu-10356/148744 |
| institution | Nanyang Technological University |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-10-01T04:50:25Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | ntu-10356/1487442021-05-06T02:50:41Z Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis Vassend, Olav B. School of Humanities Humanities::Philosophy Bayesian Confirmation Measurement Theory According to a widespread but implicit thesis in Bayesian confirmation theory, two confirmation measures are considered equivalent if they are ordinally equivalent—call this the “ordinal equivalence thesis” (OET). I argue that adopting OET has significant costs. First, adopting OET renders one incapable of determining whether a piece of evidence substantially favors one hypothesis over another. Second, OET must be rejected if merely ordinal conclusions are to be drawn from the expected value of a confirmation measure. Furthermore, several arguments and applications of confirmation measures given in the literature already rely on a rejection of OET. I also contrast OET with stronger equivalence theses and show that they do not have the same costs as OET. On the other hand, adopting a thesis stronger than OET has costs of its own, since a rejection of OET ostensibly implies that people’s epistemic states have a very fine-grained quantitative structure. However, I suggest that the normative upshot of the paper in fact has a conditional form, and that other Bayesian norms can also fruitfully be construed as having a similar conditional form. 2021-05-06T02:50:41Z 2021-05-06T02:50:41Z 2017 Journal Article Vassend, O. B. (2017). Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis. Synthese, 196(3), 1079-1095. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1500-2 0039-7857 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148744 10.1007/s11229-017-1500-2 2-s2.0-85025811013 3 196 1079 1095 en Synthese © 2017 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. All rights reserved. |
| spellingShingle | Humanities::Philosophy Bayesian Confirmation Measurement Theory Vassend, Olav B. Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis |
| title | Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis |
| title_full | Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis |
| title_fullStr | Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis |
| title_full_unstemmed | Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis |
| title_short | Confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis |
| title_sort | confirmation and the ordinal equivalence thesis |
| topic | Humanities::Philosophy Bayesian Confirmation Measurement Theory |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148744 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT vassendolavb confirmationandtheordinalequivalencethesis |