The problem of confirmation in the Everett interpretation

•Scientific reasoning would not lead to true beliefs in an Everettian universe.•Experimental evidence cannot confirm Everettian quantum mechanics.•We cannot refer to the theoretical entities of Everettian quantum mechanics.•Existing approaches to Everettian probability do not solve this epistemic problem.

I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they do not succeed in overcoming this incoherence.