In the Paradox of the Ravens, a set of otherwise intuitive claims about evidence seems to be inconsistent. Most attempts at answering the paradox involve rejecting a member of the set, which seems to require a conflict either with commonsense intuitions or with some of our best confirmation theories. In contrast, I argue that the appearance of an inconsistency is misleading: ‘confirms’ and cognate terms feature a significant ambiguity when applied to universal generalisations. In particular, the claim that some evidence confirms a universal generalisation ordinarily suggests, in part, that the evidence confirms the reliability of predicting that something which satisfies the antecedent will also satisfy the consequent. I distinguish between the familiar relation of confirmation simpliciter and what I shall call ‘predictive confirmation’. I use them to formulate my answer, illustrate it in a very simple probabilistic model, and defend it against objections. I conclude that, once our evidential concepts are sufficiently clarified, there is no sense in which the initial claims are both plausible and inconsistent.

中文翻译：

---

对乌鸦悖论的和解答案

在乌鸦悖论中，一组关于证据的直觉性主张似乎不一致。大多数回答悖论的尝试都涉及拒绝集合中的成员，这似乎需要与常识直觉或我们一些最好的确认理论发生冲突。相比之下，我认为不一致的出现具有误导性：“确认”和同源术语在应用于普遍概括时具有明显的歧义。特别是，某些证据证实普遍概括的说法通常在一定程度上表明，证据证实了预测满足前件的事物也将满足后件的可靠性。我区分了熟悉的简单确认关系和我称之为“预测性确认”的关系。我用它们来制定我的答案，用一个非常简单的概率模型来说明它，并针对反对意见进行辩护。我的结论是，一旦我们的证据概念得到充分澄清，最初的主张既合理又不一致就没有任何意义。