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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2023
Glymour’s boostrapping account of confirmation is meant to show how it is that evidence can bear on a theory in a discriminating, noncircular way even when that theory is used to establish the inferential link between evidence and a test hypothesis. Evidence confirms a theory on his account if, “using the theory, we can deduce from the evidence an instance of the hypothesis i.e., an hypothesis comprising or instantiating the test theory, and the deduction is such that it does not guarantee that we would have gotten an instance of the hypothesis regardless of what the evidence might have been.” (1980, p. 127). Glymour goes on to argue that this strategy of inference should appear most explicitly in the developing and “un-natural” (social) sciences where novel theories are being formulated or applied to new domains (1980, p. 172).
The research for this paper was partially supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Calgary. Earlier versions of the paper were read to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario (January 1985) and at the Canadian Philosophical Association Meetings (May 1985); I thank those present on these occasions for extremely valuable discussion. In particular, I thank Kathleen Okruhlik for her thoughtful and detailed commentary at the CPA.
