Abstract
In 1945, Carl Hempel proposed a simple theory of confirmation that eventually came to be seen as unacceptably unsophisticated: it failed to incorporate the impact of epistemic context, of the "superempirical virtues" such as simplicity and explanatory elegance, and it was purely qualitative, determining when a piece of evidence supported a hypothesis but not by how much. I propose that Hempel's theory, precisely because it has these properties, comes much closer to capturing the handling of evidential support in the official channels of scientific communication -- in the journals -- than is commonly supposed. I comment on the reasons for this.
