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Cosmic Confusions: Not Supporting versus Supporting Not

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

John D. Norton
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Extract

Bayesian probabilistic explication of inductive inference conflates neutrality of supporting evidence for some hypothesis H (“not supporting H”) with disfavoring evidence (“supporting not-H”). This expressive inadequacy leads to spurious results that are artifacts of a poor choice of inductive logic. I illustrate how such artifacts have arisen in simple inductive inferences in cosmology. In the inductive disjunctive fallacy, neutral support for many possibilities is spuriously converted into strong support for their disjunction. The Bayesian “doomsday argument” is shown to rely entirely on a similar artifact.

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Type
Student Essays
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Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 501 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

For helpful discussion, I thank Jeremy Butterfield, Eric Hatleback, Wayne Myrvold, and participants at the conference “Philosophy of Cosmology: Characterising Science and Beyond” at St. Anne's College, Oxford, September 20–22, 2009.

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