Broccoli Reduces the Risk of Splenetic Fever!

Abstract

That headline, a typical one from a newspaper's "Health & Wellness" section, usually written by a journalist who has just read a medical journal, can only be the result of an inductive argument, which is an argument from known contingent premisses to the unknown. What are the premisses and what is unknown for this headline and what does it mean to statistics? The importance and rationality of inductive arguments and their relation to the frequently invoked, but widely and poorly misunderstood, notion of 'falsifiability' are explained in the context of statistical model selection. No probability model can be falsified, and no hope for model buidling should be sought in that concept.