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Parsimony, Likelihood, and the Principle of the Common Cause

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Elliott Sober
Elliott Sober*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Abstract

The likelihood justification of cladistic parsimony suggested in Sober (1984) is here shown to be incomplete. Even so, cladistic parsimony remains a counterexample to the principle of the common cause formulated by Reichenbach (1956) and Salmon (1975, 1979, 1984).

Information

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 1987 , pp. 465 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Malcolm Forster, David Swofford, and, above all, to Ellery Eells for useful discussion. I also wish to thank the National Science Foundation and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Graduate School for financial support.

References

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Salmon, W. (1984), Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
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