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Putting the Irrelevance Back Into the Problem of Irrelevant Conjunction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Branden Fitelson
Branden Fitelson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, San José State University
*
†Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, San José State University, One Washington Square, San José, CA 95192-0096.
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Abstract

Naive deductive accounts of confirmation have the undesirable consequence that if E confirms H, then E also confirms the conjunction H & X, for any X—even if X is utterly irrelevant to H (and E). Bayesian accounts of confirmation also have this property (in the case of deductive evidence). Several Bayesians have attempted to soften the impact of this fact by arguing that—according to Bayesian accounts of confirmation— E will confirm the conjunction H & X less strongly than E confirms H (again, in the case of deductive evidence). I argue that existing Bayesian “resolutions” of this problem are inadequate in several important respects. In the end, I suggest a new-and-improved Bayesian account (and understanding) of the problem of irrelevant conjunction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , December 2002 , pp. 611 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Thanks to Ellery Eells, Malcolm Forster, Ken Harris, Patrick Maher, Elliott Sober, and an anonymous referee of this journal for useful comments and suggestions.

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