Reply to Hudson: "Howson on novel confirmation"

In a recent paper in this journal Robert G. Hudson (2006) criticises a discussion originally by me, later elaborated in a jointly authored work with Allan Franklin, of an example due to Maher (1988) which Maher used to motivate a Bayesian solution to the predictionversus- accommodation problem. Hudson extends his critique to an explanation by us why we thought that Mendeleev’s discovery of the Periodic Table of the chemical elements was not susceptible to the same analysis as that we gave of Maher’s example. In what follows I shall rebut his charges and show that they rest on a mixture of inattention to the text and some elementary logico-mathematical errors.