ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews certain surprising consequences of joining the equivalence condition with Nicod's rule, taken as a sufficient condition of confirmation. The obviousness of these conditions accounts for the widespread interest accorded the paradoxes of confirmation. For, quite irrespective of concurrence with Carl Gustav Hempel's own "satisfaction criterion", there is broad consensus as to these conditions themselves. Now these "paradoxical" results flow from conditions which seem, in isolation, perfectly reasonable, even obvious. That an object satisfying both antecedent and consequent of a universal conditional confirms it seems the most elementary truth about confirmation. Since Hempel criterion, moreover, gives the same results as Nicod's rule, taken as a sufficient condition only, it is clear that the paradoxes of confirmation arise within Hempel's construction. Having rejected the two proposals just considered, involving a change in our representation of scientific hypotheses, Hempel proceeds to his own treatment of the paradoxes of confirmation.
