D. N. McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have criticized economists and others for confounding statistical and substantive significance, and for committing the logical error of the transposed conditional. In doing so they sometimes misinterpret the function of significance tests. Nonetheless,...

When a significance test fails to disconfirm a hypothesis economist often interpret this as evidence that this hypothesis is valid. Six such examples are cited from recent journals. But this is a misinterpretation of what significance tests show. Presumably this misinterpretation is founded on...

Economists sometimes interpret the failure of a significance test to disconfirm a hypothesis as evidence that this hypothesis is valid. Six examples of this are cited from recent journals. But this is a as interpretation of what significance tests show. While in general it is correct that every...

This is a slightly extended version of a chapter prepared for the Handbook of Logics for Knowledge and Belief edited by Hans van Ditmarsch, Joseph Y. Halpern, Wiebe van der Hoek, and Barteld Kooi, College Publications, London. In [5] (Int. J. Game Theory, 42:567-592, 2013) a general notion of...