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The Raven's Paradox

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The Raven’s Paradox consists of three main premises – Logical Equivalence, Nicod’s Criteria and the Equivalence Condition. Two statements are logically equivalent, if it’s impossible for them to differ in truth values and they mean the same thing. For example, “All ravens are black” is logically equivalent to “All non-black things are non-ravens”. According to Nicod’s Criteria, ‘All F’s are G’s’ is confirmed by the observation of a positive instance (an F that is a G). For example, a raven that is black is a positive instance of the hypothesis that “All ravens are black”. According to the Equivalence Condition, if two hypotheses H & K are logically equivalent then anything that confirms H confirms K. For example, since “All ravens are black” …show more content…

The second premise is Nicod’s Criteria and the third premise is the Equivalence Condition. A blue bag is not black (it is blue) and it is not a raven (it is a bag), so it confirms the hypothesis “All non-black things are non-ravens”. Given the logical equivalence of the two hypotheses, anything that confirms “All non-black things are non-ravens” confirms the “All ravens are black”. Accordingly, the conclusion is that a non-black non-raven thing (like a blue bag) confirms the hypothesis that “All ravens are black”. Though these rules are intuitively possible, this result seems absurd and paradoxical. According to this, we can prove that “All ravens are black” without ever having to physically see a black raven. For example, taking the Raven’s Paradox into account, suppose you were to ask me to prove the hypothesis “All ravens are black” and I point to a green pen or a yellow baseball cap, you will obviously think I have fundamentally misunderstood. Any observation made can be used to confirm the hypothesis (unless it directly refutes it), even if it is completely unrelated. However, this is what the logical positivists are supporting. The strangeness of this cannot be

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