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On a Bayesian Analysis of the Virtue of Unification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Abstract

In three recent papers, Wayne Myrvold (1996, 2003) and Timothy McGrew (2003) have developed Bayesian accounts of the virtue of unification. In his account, McGrew demonstrates that, ceteris paribus, a hypothesis that unifies its evidence will have a higher posterior probability than a hypothesis that does not. Myrvold, on the other hand, offers a specific measure of unification that can be applied to individual hypotheses. He argues that one must account for this measure in order to calculate correctly the degree of confirmation that a hypothesis receives from its evidence. Using the probability calculus, I prove that the two accounts of unification require the same underlying inequality; thus, McGrew and Myrvold have accounted for unification in fundamentally identical probabilistic terms. I then evaluate five putative counterexamples to this account and show that these examples, far from disqualifying it, serve to clarify our notion of unification by disentangling it from a host of other concepts.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

I owe special thanks to Elliott Sober, Wayne Myrvold, and especially Timothy McGrew, for helpful correspondence.

References

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Myrvold, Wayne C. (1996), “Bayesianism and Diverse Evidence”, Bayesianism and Diverse Evidence 63:661665.Google Scholar
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Sober, Elliott (2003), “Two Uses of Unification”, in Stadler, Friedrich (ed.), The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism: Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 205216.10.1007/0-306-48214-2_17CrossRefGoogle Scholar