misconfirm

English

Etymology

From mis- +‎ confirm.

Verb

misconfirm (third-person singular simple present misconfirms, present participle misconfirming, simple past and past participle misconfirmed)

1. To confirm in error.
   • 1981, Daniel C. Dennett, “A Cure for the Common Code?”, in Ned Joel Block, editor, Readings in philosophy of psychology, page 70:

     Fodor believes that the everyday, lay explanations of behavior (of both people and beasts) in terms of beliefs and desires are of a piece with the sophisticated information-flow explanations of the neo-cognitivists, so that the self-evident acceptability of "the dog bit me because he thought I was someone else" ensures the inevitable theoretical soundness of something like " the dog's executive routine initiated the attack subroutine because in the course of perceptual analysis it generated and misconfirmed a false hypothesis about the identity of an object in its environment".

   • 1988, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Environment and Public Works, Environmental Issues Related to the Use of Pesticides, page 25:

     Chemicals have been misconfirmed in the past, misidentified, and that has caused a lot of problems.

   • 2011, Gilbert Cockton, Alan Woolrych, “Understanding Inspection Methods: Lessons from an Assessment of Heuristic Evaluation”, in Ann Blandford, Jean Vanderdonckt, Phil Gray, editors, People and Computers XV — Interaction without Frontiers, page 186:

     When analysts mistakenly trust their common sense and misconfirm an improbable problem, they fail to exploit heuristics as a last resource.