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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1995 46(3):399-424; doi:10.1093/bjps/46.3.399
© 1995 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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REVIEW ARTICLE

Bayes and Bust: Simplicity as a Problem for a Probabilist's Approach to Confirmation1

Malcolm R. Forster

Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison Madison, WI 53706, USA

The central problem with Bayesian philosophy of science is that it cannot take account of the relevance of simplicity and unification to confirmation, induction, and scientific inference. The standard Bayesian folklore about factoring simplicity into the priors, and convergence theorems as a way of grounding their objectivity are some of the myths that Earman's book does not address adequately.

1Review of John Earman: Bayes or Bust?, Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1992, £33.75cloth.


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D. L. Dowe, S. Gardner, and G. Oppy
Bayes not Bust! Why Simplicity is no Problem for Bayesians
Brit J Philos Sci, December 1, 2007; 58(4): 709 - 754.
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