A conciliatory answer to the paradox of the ravens

Peden, William

Abstract

In the Paradox of the Ravens, a set of otherwise intuitive claims about evidence seems to be inconsistent. Most attempts at answering the paradox involve rejecting a member of the set, which seems to require a conflict either with commonsense intuitions or with some of our best confirmation theories. In contrast, I argue that the appearance of an inconsistency is misleading: ‘confirms’ and cognate terms feature a significant ambiguity when applied to universal generalisations. In particular, the claim that some evidence confirms a universal generalisation ordinarily suggests, in part, that the evidence confirms the reliability of predicting that something which satisfies the antecedent will also satisfy the consequent. I distinguish between the familiar relation of confirmation simpliciter and what I shall call ‘predictive confirmation’. I use them to formulate my answer, illustrate it in a very simple probabilistic model, and defend it against objections. I conclude that, once our evidential concepts are sufficiently clarified, there is no sense in which the initial claims are both plausible and inconsistent.

Citation

Peden, W. (2020). A conciliatory answer to the paradox of the ravens. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 51(1), 45-64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-019-09485-3

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Mar 31, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jan 10, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 10, 2020
• Journal: Journal for General Philosophy of Science
• Print ISSN: 0925-4560
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-8587
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 51
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 45-64
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-019-09485-3
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1699950