or confirmation paradox, n. the paradox of induction that shows that logically equivalent statements are not equivalent for the purposes of confirmation by experience: we ordinarily regard every sighting of a black raven as supporting the hypothesis that all ravens are black, which is equivalent to the proposition that all non-black things are non-ravens, so that whatever tends to confirm one equally tends to confirm the other. Further, both statements have the same universal affirmative form, so that each should be equally supported by instances that instantiate both its subject and predicate; hence observations of non-black non-ravens, such as white handkerchiefs, should tend to confirm the second statement, and so also the first, yet this is patently absurd. The paradox may be resolved by regarding such statements as involving restricted quantifiers: it is not asserted of everything whatever that if it is a raven it is black, but only of ravens that all of them are. (Named after the German-born American positivist philosopher of science Carl Gustave Hempel (1905-). ) See also Goodman's paradox.