ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Carl Gustav Hempel's important study of the problem and formulate this problem as one of defining 'e confirms h'. Hempel's concern in the study under consideration is qualitative rather than comparative or metrical. Hempel presents a critique of two standard conceptions of confirmation, in the course of which he develops adequacy conditions he then tries to satisfy in framing his own definitions. The first conception he deals with is a very widespread one indeed; he takes for analysis, however, a particularly clear statement of it by Jean Nicod, labeling it 'Nicod's criterion'. As in the case of Nicod's criterion, there is a restriction to hypotheses of special sorts; in the present case, to those involving universal conditionals in which the predicates are observational. The second conception of confirmation criticized by Hempel is one that is based on the notion of prediction; he therefore refers to it as the prediction-criterion of confirmation.
