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A Suspicious Feature of the Popper/Miller Argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

I. J. Good*
Affiliation:
Department of Statistics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Extract

The form of argument used by Popper and Miller to attack the concept of probabilistic induction is applied to the slightly different situation in which some evidence undermines a hypothesis. The result is seemingly absurd, thus bringing the form of argument under suspicion.

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

This note is reproduced from a recent issue of the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, with the permission of the editor and of the publishers, Gordon and Breach.

This work was supported in part from a grant from N.I.H.

References

Good, I. J. (1985), “Probabilistic Induction Is Inevitable”, C216 in Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation 20: 323324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popper, K. R. and Miller, D. W. (1983), “A Proof of the Impossibility of Inductive Probability”, Nature 302: 687688; 310 (1984): 434.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popper, K. R. and Miller, D. W. (1987), “Why Probabilistic Support Is Not Inductive”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London A 321: 569591.Google Scholar