Does information inform confirmation?

Colin Howson

pp. 2307-2321

in: Synthese 193 (7), 2016.

Abstract

In a recent survey of the literature on the relation between information and confirmation, Crupi and Tentori (Stud Hist Philos Sci 47:81–90, 2014) claim that the former is a fruitful source of insight into the latter, with two well-known measures of confirmation being definable purely information-theoretically. I argue that of the two explicata of semantic information (due originally to Bar Hillel and Carnap) which are considered by the authors, the one generating a popular Bayesian confirmation measure is a defective measure of information, while the other, although an admissible measure of information, generates a defective measure of confirmation. Some results are proved about the representation of measures on consequence-classes.

Cited authors

Carnap Rudolf