Abstract

A formalism for the incremental confirmation of one hypothesis relative to another hypothesis and the requirement for adding a hypothesis to a belief system is presented as a sufficient explication of confirmation. The formalism is contrasted with the explications of confirmation offered by Ian Hacking and Karl Popper. It is shown to solve some of the problems which are most often put forth as foils of similar approaches to confirmation theory. Finally, the method is indicated by which the formalism avoids all other standard problems.