Study Of The Paradox Of Confirmation

The Paradox of Confirmation was first proposed by the American philosopher Hempel which is a classic induction paradox. Hempel found a “surprising conclusion” in the study of Nicod Criterion and the Equivalence Condition which prompted him to study the paradox of confirmation in detail. In 1945, Hempel use the universal hypothesis “All ravens are black” as an example in his article Studies in the Logic of confirmaition. Hempel got a series of intuition and logic paradox by the Nicod Criterion, the Equivalence condition and the basic rules of deductive logic which is widely accepted. It led a lot of modern philosophers to the studies of the paradox of confirmation.The Paradox of Confirmation is actually a paradox of epistemology which is about how universal hypothesis was reasonable accepted. The establishment of a scientific theory must be subjected to the test of experience and knowledge. The universal hypothesis cannot be confirmed in many cases. So the empirical evidence of confirmation is crucial.A large number of scientists and philosophers discussed because of the important of the paradox of confirmation. Scientific methodology method, represented by Hempel, thinks that the paradox of confirmation results from the influence of background beliefs. Relevance method, represented by Mackie, tries to eliminate the paradox from the relevane which can be represented by probability of the evidence to the tested hypothesis in some confirmation environment. The Bayesian method thought Relevance method is reasonable in take background beliefs into the resolving of the paradox. But they do not think that probability is purely logical, but depends on the cognitive subjective reliability. The Bayesian method tries to describe the degree of support for the hypothesis of evidence by the probability calculation. There are also scientists try toeliminate the paradox from the perspective of pragmatics and semantics.The Paradox of Confirmation has yet get an exant solution and widely accepted. Modern philosophers have tried to resolving the paradox from the point of view to find better solution. This paper attempts to sort out these various schemes of solution and question, through the interpretation of the paradox of confirmation of the core connotation and find out some answers.