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The Independence Condition in the Variety-of-Evidence Thesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

François Claveau
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Abstract

The variety-of-evidence thesis has been criticized by Bovens and Hartmann. This article points to two limitations of their Bayesian model: the conceptualization of unreliable evidential sources as randomizing and the restriction to comparing full independence to full dependence. It is shown that the variety-of-evidence thesis is rehabilitated when unreliable sources are reconceptualized as systematically biased. However, it turns out that allowing for degrees of independence leads to a qualification of the variety-of-evidence thesis: as Bovens and Hartmann claimed, more independence does not always imply stronger confirmation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 94 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I thank Stephan Hartmann, Kevin Hoover, Conor Mayo-Wilson, Luca Moretti, and Julian Reiss for their helpful comments, James Kelleher for English proofreading, and the SSHRC (767-2009-0001) for financial support.

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