Confirmation and Induction

Abstract

How are scientific hypotheses and theories assessed against empirical data? Philosophers of science have tried to find out whether there are general principles underlying this activity. This chapter goes through the major types of philosophical theories of confirmation. It starts with two proposals that elaborate criteria of qualitative confirmation on the basis of (deductive) logic: instantialism and hypothetico-deductivism. The main part of the chapter is devoted to Bayesian confirmation theory (BCT), which relies on a probabilistic framework and is able to provide both qualitative and quantitative criteria of confirmation. We discuss in details the strengths and limits of BCT. In the closing section, we address the issue of how BCT (and Bayesianism in general) relate to the problem of induction.