It's widely supposed that unification is an epistemic virtue: the degree to which a theory is unified contributes to its overall confirmation. However, this supposition has consequences which haven't been noted, and which undermine the leading accounts of unification. For, given Hempel's equivalence condition, any epistemic virtue must be such that logically equivalent theories must equally well unify any body of evidence, and logically equivalent bodies of evidence must be equally well unified by any theory. Yet the leading accounts of (...) unification in Bayesian terms, or those in terms of argument patterns, cannot satisfy these constraints conditions. The reason for this runs deep: these accounts of unification make unity depend on factors that vary between equivalent theories: the probabilistic relations of their components, or their relations to argument patterns. The solution is to abandon such accounts and instead adopt an account of unity based on worldly relations such as causation, rather than inferential relations. Such an account effortlessly satisfies the equivalence conditions, and so may describe the epistemic virtue of unity. (shrink)

This paper purports a limited study of the concept of reason. It analyzes the claim of religious belief to be reasonable. The context for this analysis is an examination of some evidential (criteriological) connections between reasonable belief and ?(good) reasons? for such belief. Consideration of the typical sort of evidential connection shows, not surprisingly, that religious belief cannot claim to be reasonable. But it is argued that there is (at least) one other sort of connection, and that it is philosophically (...) plausible to regard this connection as definitive of a quite distinctive sense of ?reasonable?, with its own kind and style of criteria, according to which religious belief can be thought reasonable. (shrink)

Several authors, e.g. Patrick Suppes and I. J. Good, have recently argued that the paradox of confirmation can be resolved within the developing subjective Bayesian account of inductive reasoning. The aim of this paper is to show that the paradox can also be resolved by the rival orthodox account of hypothesis testing currently employed by most statisticians and scientists. The key to the orthodox statistical resolution is the rejection of a generalized version of Hempel's instantiation condition, namely, the condition that (...) a PQ is inductively relevant to the hypothesis $(x)(Px\supset Qx)$ even in the absence of all further information. Though their reasons differ, it turns out that Bayesian and orthodox statisticians agree that this condition lies at the heart of the paradox. (shrink)