Scientific hypotheses often make little contact with evidence claims on their own.

Before going on to describing the logic of evidential support in more detail, perhaps a few more words are in order about the background knowledge and auxiliary hypotheses, represented here by ‘\(b\)’. Duhem (1906) and Quine (1953) are generally credited with alerting inductive logicians to the importance of auxiliary hypotheses in connecting scientific hypotheses and theories to empirical evidence. (See the entry on Pierre Duhem.) They point out that scientific hypotheses often make little co