Thanks, that’s interesting. The exercise of thinking how people would act to gather evidence having in mind the two probabilistic definitions gives food for thought. Specifically, I’m thinking that, if we were to tell people: “Look for evidence in favor of h and, remember, evidence is that which …”, where we substitute ‘...’ by the relevant definition of evidence, they would gather evidence in a different way from the way we naturally look for evidence for some hypotheses. The agents to whom that advice was given would have a reflexive access to their own definition of evidence, and they would gather only what is in the scope of that definition. People being given the first definition of evidence could balk when looking for evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident: if they find out that Obama will be in an airplane today, they find out evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident. Now given that these people would have the advice we gave them in mind, they could start questioning themselves if they didn’t receive silly advice.
Thanks, that’s interesting. The exercise of thinking how people would act to gather evidence having in mind the two probabilistic definitions gives food for thought. Specifically, I’m thinking that, if we were to tell people: “Look for evidence in favor of h and, remember, evidence is that which …”, where we substitute ‘...’ by the relevant definition of evidence, they would gather evidence in a different way from the way we naturally look for evidence for some hypotheses. The agents to whom that advice was given would have a reflexive access to their own definition of evidence, and they would gather only what is in the scope of that definition. People being given the first definition of evidence could balk when looking for evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident: if they find out that Obama will be in an airplane today, they find out evidence that Obama will be involved in an airplane accident. Now given that these people would have the advice we gave them in mind, they could start questioning themselves if they didn’t receive silly advice.