The Raven Paradox: All Ravens Are Black

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The Raven paradox includes three plausible premises, and derives from them a fairly implausible-looking conclusion about the confirmation of generalizations. The first premise is: “All ravens are black.” This premise is a hypothesis that takes a general form -- “all Fs are G”. The hypothesis “All ravens are black” is logically equivalent to the hypothesis “All non-black things are non-ravens.” Logical equivalence can be defined as: “P being logically equivalent to Q,” which means that P and Q are true or false in all the same situations and that each one is a valid argument for the other. In any instance, anything that confirms one confirms the other. Confirmation Theory of Instance says if while testing a hypothesis in the form “All Fs are G”, a particular F (for some instance) is discovered to also be G, then this evidence is enough (at least to some degree) to favor the hypothesis.
So, the hypothesis that “All non-black things are non-ravens” applies because it amounts to a hypothesis which also rules out one possibility: a non-black thing that is a raven. The hypotheses are equivalent to the same hypothesis of there being no non-black ravens (which verifies they must also therefore be equivalent to each other). Their equivalence only provides an incremental confirmation because E can only increase evidential support for H, but cannot provide absolute confirmation, and can only confirm H when E is a black

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