Analysis Advance Access originally published online on July 14, 2009
Analysis 2009 69(4):630-635; doi:10.1093/analys/anp103
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
An argument for the likelihood-ratio measure of confirmation
University College, Gower Street London WC1E 6BT, UK j.zalabardo@ucl.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the recent literature on confirmation there are two leading approaches to the provision of a probabilistic measure of the degree to which a hypothesis is confirmed by evidence. The first is to construe the degree to which evidence E confirms hypothesis H as a function that is directly proportional to p(H | E) and inversely proportional to p(H). I shall refer to this as the probability approach. The second approach construes the notion as a function that is directly proportional to the true-positive rate – the probability of the evidence if the hypothesis is true, p(E | H) – and inversely proportional to the false-positive rate – the probability of the evidence if the hypothesis is false, p(E | 
H). These reverse conditional probabilities – of the evidence on the truth or falsehood of the hypothesis