Contrastive confirmation: some competing accounts

I outline four competing probabilistic accounts of contrastive evidential support and consider various considerations that might help arbitrate between these. The upshot of the discussion is that the so-called ‘Law of Likelihood’ is to be preferred to any of the alternatives considered.

[1]  Christopher Hitchcock,et al.  Contrastive Explanation and the Demons of Determinism , 1999, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

[2]  J. Chandler.  Solving the Tacking Problem with Contrast Classes , 2007, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

[3]  Branden Fitelson,et al.  STUDIES IN BAYESIAN CONFIRMATION THEORY , 2001 .

[4]  E. McClennen.  Rationality and dynamic choice , 1990 .

[5]  Dennis Temple,et al.  The Contrast Theory of Why-Questions , 1988, Philosophy of Science.

[6]  Ian Hacking.  Logic of Statistical Inference , 1965 .

[7]  Branden Fitelson,et al.  A DECISION PROCEDURE FOR PROBABILITY CALCULUS WITH APPLICATIONS , 2008, The Review of Symbolic Logic.

[8]  D. Knowles,et al.  Explanation and its Limits , 1991 .

[9]  A. Garfinkel,et al.  Forms of explanation : rethinking the questions in social theory , 1982 .

[10]  E. Sober.  Is Drift a Serious Alternative to Natural Selection as an Explanation of Complex Adaptive Traits? , 2005, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement.

[11]  Branden Fitelson,et al.  Likelihoodism, Bayesianism, and relational confirmation , 2007, Synthese.

[12]  S. Spear,et al.  The Nature of Scientific Evidence , 2007 .

[13]  Christopher Hitchcock,et al.  The role of contrast in causal and explanatory claims , 1996, Synthese.

[14]  R. Swinburne.  Bayes's theorem , 2005 .

[15]  Ian Hacking.  ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF STATISTICS* , 1964, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

[16]  R. Royall.  Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm , 1997 .

[17]  David-Hillel Ruben,et al.  Explaining contrastive facts , 1987 .

[18]  A. O'hear.  Philosophy, Biology and Life , 2005 .

[19]  Elliott Sober,et al.  Why Likelihood ? , 1980 .

[20]  Branden Fitelson.  The Plurality of Bayesian Measures of Confirmation and the Problem of Measure Sensitivity , 1999, Philosophy of Science.