  In Hempel's paradox of the ravens, seeing a red pencil is considered as
supporting evidence that all ravens are black. Also known as the Paradox of
Confirmation, the paradox and its many resolutions indicate that we cannot
underestimate the logical and statistical elements needed in the assessment of
evidence in support of a hypothesis. Most of the previous analyses of the
paradox are within the Bayesian framework. These analyses and Hempel himself
generally accept the paradoxical conclusion; it feels paradoxical supposedly
because the amount of evidence is extremely small. Here I describe a
nonBayesian analysis of various statistical models with an accompanying
likelihood-based reasoning. The analysis shows that the paradox feels
paradoxical because there are natural models where observing a red pencil has
no relevance to the color of ravens. In general the value of the evidence
depends crucially on the sampling scheme and on the assumption about the
underlying parameters of the relevant model.
