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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1994 45(1):193-200; doi:10.1093/bjps/45.1.193
© 1994 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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Contentious Contents: For Inductive Probability

ANDREW ELBY *

Department of Physics University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 USA

According to Popper and Miller [1983 and 1987], the part of a hypothesis that transcends the evidence is probablistically countersupported by the evidence. Therefore, inductive support is not probabilistic support. Their argument hinges on imposing the following necessary condition on ‘the part of a hypothesis h that goes beyond the evidence e’: that transcendent part, called k, must share no nontrivial consequences with e.

I propose a new condition on k that is incompatible with Popper and Miller's condition. I then show why the new condition is a viable alternative to Popper and Miller's. By doing so, I refute their argument that probabilistic support cannot be inductive.

*I'd like to thank Michael Redhead. Jeremy Butterfield. and an anonymous referee for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks especially to David Miller for insightful criticisms. Adopted from work done in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. University of Cambridge. 1989.


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