Research On The Paradox Of Confirmation And Solving Paradox

Scientific theories must be empirically and intellectually tested in order to be established,otherwise they can only be called hypotheses.The theory of corroboration is meant to give a standard of substantiation to these hypotheses,which are all but nominal and need to be tested empirically.The famous German-American logician and philosopher of science Hempel,when studying the criterion of corroboration in 1937,found that combining the Nicon Criterion with the equivalence condition gave rise to the paradox of confirmation,which consists of a logical paradox and an intuitive paradox.This paradox is also known as the Raven Paradox or Hempel Paradox.The paradox focuses on the fact that "one thing that is not black or crow",such as a white cat or a red flower,corroborate the universal propositional hypothesis that "all crows are black".The paradox has attracted a great deal of attention since its formulation,and many philosophers have worked on various aspects of its solution.There are three types of classical foreign solutions to the paradox: the first is the scientific methodological solution of the elimination type,represented by Hempel.Hempel argues that paradoxes arise because of the human intuitive fallacy,i.e.the cognitive subject presupposes additional knowledge in his intuition.This solution advocates paradox resolution by retaining the equivalence condition and discarding the "irrelevance" condition of the Nicodian criterion.Quine’s natural class solution to the paradox is to propose a Quine-Nicod criterion that restricts all universal hypotheses to instances of "natural class" in order to be corroborated.The second is the coherence solution,represented by Mc Gee’s corroborative coherence solution,which proposes a set of criteria for measuring the weight of background beliefs in an attempt to dissolve the corroboration paradox.Von Wright proposed the concept of "relevance" in the framework of formal logic for the corroboration of evidence.In other words,whether the evidence corroborates the main term depends on whether the evidence is within the "relevant range" of the main term.The third is the Bayesian solution to the paradox.Bayesian theoretical solutions use modern logical probability to quantify the evidence and hypothesis,and portray the degree of corroboration of the evidence to the hypothesis.In addition,some scholars in China have proposed an epistemological disambiguation scheme for the corroboration paradox.This scheme considers the corroboration paradox as an epistemological paradox,and the basic paradox resolution strategy is to retain and reshape the Nicod Criterion by modifying the corroboration equivalence condition to the corroboration content.Good paradox resolution schemes need to adhere to certain paradox resolution criteria.These solutions provide some answers to the confirmation paradox from various perspectives,but they also have certain limitations: the treatment of the background knowledge required for the corroboration of the hypothesis,whether the solutions are compatible with people’s thinking habits in practice,and whether the solutions are applicable to each individual case of the confirmation paradox need to be analysed and studied.The study of confirmation paradoxes and their solutions opens a new chapter in the extensive study of confirmation problems and theories of evidence in the philosophy of science.The study of confirmation paradox also pushes inductive logic in the direction of quantification,which facilitates the study and solution of inductive problems.