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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that C.D. Broad and later Elliott Sober showed that cumulative case arguments conflate correlated evidence with genuinely additive probabilistic support.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Not all cumulative case arguments treat evidence as independent; sophisticated versions explicitly model evidential relationships and adjust accordingly.
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    • 2.Even correlated evidence can provide multiplicative support if each piece explains distinct phenomena or comes from independent sources, which Broad/Sober underaddressed.
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    • 3.The charge conflates a flaw in how some argue cumulatively with whether cumulative reasoning itself is invalid as a philosophical method.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Evidence for God's existence (fine-tuning, cosmological, moral arguments) often shares common explanatory targets, making them probabilistically dependent.
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    • 2.When evidence is correlated, multiplying probabilities as if independent artificially inflates cumulative support without accounting for this dependence.
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    • 3.Bayesian analysis requires explicit conditional probabilities; cumulative case arguments typically omit these calculations entirely.
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