Abstract

This paper reviews and adds to previous arguments for the thesis that Karl Popper was mistaken to have rejected hypothetico-deductive confirmation. By turning from the positive idea of verification to the negative idea of criticism, Popper believed that he had turned his back on induction. He believed he had “solved” the “problem of induction” by providing a non-inductive account of corroboration. Popper used the term “corroboration” rather than confirmation which he believed was too closely allied to the notion of the inductive or probabilistic support that a theory can receive from evidence. Wesley Salmon’s “concept of confirming evidence” and Clark Glymour’s “bootstrap conception of evidence for theory” both defended respectively the thesis that passed tests can be confirmed by evidence or warranted by the degree of probability. Using a sequence of symbols in logical form or analysis, I shall further defend the concept to hypothetico-deductive confirmation in order to show that the known weaknesses of Popper’s critical rationalism are remediable, once the notion of evidence for theories is brought back into consideration.