Subjective Probabilities as Basis for Scientific Reasoning?
Franz Huber · The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science · 2005
Bayesianism is the position that scientific reasoning is probabilistic and that probabilities are adequately interpreted as an agent's actual subjective degrees of belief, measured by her betting behaviour. Confirmation is one important aspect of scientific reasoning. The thesis of this paper is the following: if scientific reasoning is at all probabilistic, the subjective interpretation has to be given up in order to get right confirmation—and thus scientific reasoning in general. 1. The Bayesian approach to scientific reasoning 2. Bayesian confirmation theory 3. The example 4. The less reliable the source of information, the higher the degree of Bayesian confirmation 5. Measure sensitivity 6. A more general version of the problem of old evidence 7. Conditioning on the entailment relation 8. The counterfactual strategy 9. Generalizing the counterfactual strategy 10. The desired result, and a necessary and sufficient condition for it 11. Actual degrees of belief 12. The common knock-down feature, or ‘anything goes’ 13. The problem of prior probabilities