THE NON-STANDARD APPROACH TO CONFIRMATION AND THE RAVENS PARADOXES

Patrick Maher’s (PM, for short) critical paper requires a long reply. His first main point is my non-standard approach to confirmation. The second deals with my notion of conditional deductive confirmation and its application to the ravens paradoxes. In the first part of this reply I defend the non-standard approach extensively in a non-dogmatic way. In the second part I defend the notion of conditional deductive confirmation and its application to both counterintuitive cases dealing with ravens, or rather with black and non-black non-ravens. I am happy to be able to conclude this reply with a survey of the main interesting observations that I learned from Maher’s critical exposition. The Non-Standard Approach, i.e. the Success Definition of Confirmation On Section 1: Definition of Confirmation In Section 1, Maher criticizes my success definition of confirmation in a way that demands either retreat or extensive defense. For the moment I opt for the latter. In the introduction to Part I of ICR (p. 15) I announce the three main non-standard aspects of the success definition: its “reversive ” (although I di