"Sampling the reference set" revisited : in honour of Sir

The confidence level of an inferencE' table is defined as a weight.ed truth probability of the inference when sampling the reference set. The reference set is recognized by conditioning on the values of ma.ximal partially ancilla.ry st.at.ist.irs. In the sampling experiment values of incidental parameters are sampl(~d from fiducial distributions. The concepts in this paper generalize ideas of Fisher (] D6] ). AMS Subject Clo88z{icatioll G2A99, G2 F9D. I{eywonI8: Conditional inference, In ft'r('nce tahk. Confidence leveL Ancillarity, Fiducial distribution.