Metaconfirmation

When is it possible to decide that a theory is confirmed by the available evidence? Probabilities seem first to be the good framework for addressing this question. But the philosophers of science did not succeed in building any probabilistic criterion of confirmation beyond dispute. We examine two of the main reasons for this failure. First, the principles of adequacy used by philosophers are often logically inconsistent with each other. We show in the paper how to build consistent subsets of these principles. We identify three main subsets which embody the principles of adequacy for two main kinds of confirmation, namely the relative confirmation and the absolute confirmation. Second, we prove the impossibility of building any probabilistic criterion for absolute confirmation.