Bayesian pseudo-confirmation, use-novelty, and genuine confirmation

•I show that Bayesian confirmation is too weak to discriminate science from pseudo-science.•Genuine confirmation consists in the confirmation of content parts that transcend the evidence.•My account of genuine confirmation subsumes Worrall’s concept of use-novel evidence.•Confirmation by post-facto parameter-fitting does not yield genuine confirmation.

According to the comparative Bayesian concept of confirmation, rationalized versions of creationism come out as empirically confirmed. From a scientific viewpoint, however, they are pseudo-explanations because with their help all kinds of experiences are explainable in an ex-post fashion, by way of ad-hoc fitting of an empirically empty theoretical framework to the given evidence. An alternative concept of confirmation that attempts to capture this intuition is the use novelty (UN) criterion of confirmation. Serious objections have been raised against this criterion. In this paper I suggest solutions to these objections. Based on them, I develop an account of genuine confirmation that unifies the UN-criterion with a refined probabilistic confirmation concept that is explicated in terms of the confirmation of evidence-transcending content parts of the hypothesis.