Econometricians commonly want to confirm some precise hypothesis, such as a consequence of economic theory, an economic hypothesis, or a econometric modeling assumption. In practice, researchers routinely use significance tests that can only fail to reject the hypothesis of interest. Generalizing previous work by Romano (2005), I propose a new theoretical framework for confirmation of multivari...

Abduction can be seen as the formal inference corresponding to human hypothesis making. It typically has the purpose of explaining some given observation. In classical abduction, hypotheses could be made on events that may have occurred in the past. In general, abductive reasoning can be used to generate hypotheses about events possibly occurring in the future (forecasting), or may suggest furt...

Representations and Confirmation Christopher Pincock ([email protected])

‡We gratefully acknowledge our indebtedness to Kevin Kelly and David Danks. We would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for very detailed and helpful comments. have been concerned to show that certain procedural accounts of model confirmation are compromised by non-linear dynamics. We suggest that the issues raised are better approached by considering whether chaotic data analysis methods...

NMR studies settle part of a long-standing debate about the mechanism used by the Hsp70 chaperone to recognize substrates.

In most expert systems, efforts are made to keep the rules in the knowledge base free from contradictions., because a logical system that generates even a single contradiction may collapse. We argue that not only can contradictions be tolerated, but in fact they are useful. An excellent test of an argument is to compare it with the best argument for the opposing view. Accordingly, we propose a ...

Hypothetico-deductive (H-D) confirmation builds on the idea that confirming evidence consists of successful predictions that deductively follow from the hypothesis under test. This article reviews scope, history and recent development of the venerable H-D account: First, we motivate the approach and clarify its relationship to Bayesian confirmation theory. Second, we explain and discuss the tac...

Models used for Model-Based Diagnosis usually assume that the inaccuracy of data is smaller than the precision with which the data is described. In some domains, however, this assumption is invalid. Observations may not be accurate or the behavior model of the system does not allow for accurate predictions. Therefore, the accuracy of predictions, which is a function of the accuracy of the obser...

Systems that attempt to understand natural human input make mistakes, even humans. However, humans avoid misunderstandings by confirming doubtful input. Multimodal systems--those that combine simultaneous input from more than one modality, for example speech and gesture--have historically been designed so that they either request confwmation of speech, their primary modality, or not at all. Ins...

Idea: E [∼Ra &∼Ba] confirms H [(∀x)(Rx ⊃ Bx)] relative to >, but E doesn’t confirm H relative to some background K ≠ >. Question: Which K ≠ >? Answer: K = ∼Ra. Idea: If you already know that ∼Ra, then observing a’s color won’t tell you anything about the color of ravens. Distinguish the following two claims: (PC) ∼Ra &∼Ba confirms (∀x)(Rx ⊃ Bx), relative to >. (PC*) ∼Ra &∼Ba confirms (∀x)(Rx ⊃ ...