Dissertations / Theses: 'Confirmation'

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Lin, Chao-tien. "Confirmation theory & confirmation logic." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/28859.

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Abstract:

The title of my dissertation is "confirmation theory & confirmation logic", and it consists of five Parts. The motivation of the dissertation was to construct an adequate confirmation theory that could solve "the paradoxes of confirmation" discovered by Carl G. Hempel. In Part One I try mainly to do the three things, (i) introduce the fundamentals of Hempel's theory of qualitative confirmation as the common background for subsequent discussions, (ii) review the major views of the paradoxes of confirmation, (iii) present a new view, which is more radical than other known views, and argue that a solution to the paradoxes of confirmation may require a change of logic. In Part Two I construct a number of promising three-valued logics. I employ these "quasi confirmation logics" as the underlying logics of some new confirmation theories which, I had hoped, would solve the paradoxes of confirmation. I consider three-valued logics instead of any other many-valued logics as the underlying logic for any promising confirmation theory, because I believe that there is some intimate relationship or, even, a one-to-one correspondence between the (controversial) three truth-values of "truth", "falsity" and "neither truth nor falsity" and, respectively, the (non-controversial) three confirmation-statuses of "confirmation", "disconfirmation" and "neutrality". Unfortunately, these theories were found to be semantically inadequate. This became clear after a complete semantics for them had been developed. Thus, one negative result of Part Two is that our syntactical approach to confirmation theory is wrong from the very beginning. However, from this negative result we learn a positive lesson: a semantical approach is more fundamental and decisive than a syntactical one, at least this is so for constructing an adequate theory of confirmation. It is rewarding to note that the three-valued semantics worked out in Part Two is simple, complete and the first of its kind. In fact, the new three-valued semantics is in the spirit of Frege, although the line of thought is much neglected (even by Frege himself). In Part Three I shift the search for a confirmation logic and an adequate theory of confirmation from a syntactical to a semantical approach because of the lesson learned in Part Two. After a systematic search through several promising three-valued logics I come, at last, to a plausible confirmation logic and to a confirmation theory that could solve all known paradoxes of confirmation. The promising three-valued confirmation theory is called "the internal confirmation theory". In Part Four I review and appraise the adequacy conditions laid down by Hempel as the necessary conditions for any adequate confirmation theory. Under the criticisms of Carnap, Goodman and, especially, with the help of Hanen's thorough studies, I come to almost an identical conclusion to Hanen's we should not impose a priori in a theory of qualitative confirmation any adequacy conditions laid down by Hempel except perhaps the Entailment Condition, although the internal confirmation theory also adopts the Equivalence Condition for some intrinsic reasons. In the last Part Five I try to appraise the three most important confirmation theories discussed and/or constructed in this dissertation. They are Hempel's theory of confirmation, Goodman's and Scheffler's theory of selective confirmation and the internal confirmation theory. After some more vigorous criticisms are made and some new paradoxes of confirmation are unexpectedly derived in both the theory of selective confirmation and the internal confirmation theory, I arrive at, perhaps reluctantly, this more reasonable conclusion under the present situation when there is no obvious way to overcome the new difficulties the best thing that we can do is to dissolve (i.e. to live with) all new and old paradoxes of confirmation, for Hempel may be after all right to say that the paradoxes of confirmation are not genuine and to think otherwise is to have psychological illusions as Hempel says.
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