ABSTRACT
Before discussing weight of evidence it is worth while to point out that evidence and information have distinctive meanings in ordinary English, though many writers on technical subjects have confused them. You might ask a game-player for information about the game of Go or evidence about whether it is a more difficult game than chess, but you wouldn’t ask simply for evidence about Go. Evidence pertains to whether some hypothesis, theory, or statement is true, but information has a wider meaning. In this chapter we shall be mainly concerned with the concept of weight of evidence in its normal usage in good English, and with a corresponding simple technical concept which captures the normal usage in a simple formula. I shall not use the expression to mean the weight of the paper on which some evidence is printed.
