'c is a raven and is black' must be considered "by itself and without reference to any other information", and pointing out that it "... was emphasized in section 5.2(b) of my article in Mind ... that the very appearance of paradoxicality in cases like that of the white shoe results in part from a failure to observe this maxim." The question that then arises is whether the paradox is to be understood in the context of absolutely no background information (as Hempel suggests), or in the context of the background information that we actually possess regarding ravens and black objects, or with regard to all possible configurations of background information. Good had shown that, for some configurations of background knowledge, Nicod's criterion is false (provided that we are willing to equate "inductively support" with "increase the probability of" – see below). The possibility remained that, with respect to our actual configuration of knowledge, which is very different from Good's example, Nicod's criterion might still be true and so we could still reach the paradoxical conclusion. Hempel, on the other hand, insists our background knowledge itself is the red herring, and that we should consider induction with respect to a condition of perfect ignorance. Good's baby In his proposed resolution, Maher implicitly made use of the fact that the proposition "All ravens are black" is highly probable when it is highly probable that there are no ravens. Good had used this fact before to respond to Hempel's insistence that Nicod's criterion was to be understood to hold in the absence of background information: ...imagine an infinitely intelligent newborn baby having built-in neural circuits enabling him to deal with formal logic, English syntax, and subjective probability. He might now argue, after defining a raven in detail, that it is extremely unlikely that there are any ravens, and therefore it is extremely likely that all ravens are black, that is, that is true. 'On the other hand', he goes on to argue, 'if there are ravens, then there is a reasonable chance that they are of a variety of colours. Therefore, if I were to discover that even a black raven exists I would consider to be less probable than it was initially.' This, according to Good, is as close as one can reasonably expect to get to a condition of perfect ignorance, and it appears that Nicod's condition is still false.