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Gunnell on “Deductivism,” the “Logic” of Science and Scientific Explanation: A Riposte

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

A. James Gregor
A. James Gregor*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

It is impossible to tender a reply to Professor Gunnell's essay, “Deduction, Explanation and Social Scientific Inquiry,” that would be both brief and adequate. It would be impossible to be brief because Gunnell conjures up a tagraggery of issues, none of which he seems prepared and/or disposed to resolve. But no matter how extensive a reply might be, it would still be impossible to conceive it as adequate for I am not sure that I, or anyone else, can determine precisely what he means to say in the essay before us. It is impossible for me to determine with any specificity whatsoever, for example, what it means to say:

Logical empiricism as an approach to the philosophy of science has been concerned with developing formal representations or reconstructions of the logical structure of scientific explanation and with a meta-logical analysis of the language applied to science. In this view there is a very strict correlation between the philosophy of science and formal logic.

I haven't the foggiest notion what a “metalogical analysis of the language applied to science” might mean. I had always understood “metalogic” to refer to discourse employing logic as its object language—just as metamathematics would be a language employed in the analysis of mathematics as an object language.

Type
Symposium on Scientific Explanation in Political Science
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1969 , pp. 1251 - 1258
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1969

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References

1 Gunnell, John G., “Deduction, Explanation, and Social Scientific Inquiry,” this Review, LXIII (12, 1969), p. 1238 Google Scholar, emphasis added.

2 Lukasiewicz and Carnap have used “metalogic” to refer to that metalanguage concerned with logic as its object language—more specifically with a subdomain of syntactical (not substantive) analysis which treats of logical sentences to the exclusion of specifically mathematical ones. Certainly “metalogic” would never refer to the analysis of sentences in the material mode, i.e., substantive sentences. Arthur Pap simply uses the term, “metalogic” to designate discourse about logic (as a formal language). Cf. Carnap, R., The Logical Syntax of Language (New York: Humanities Press, 1951), p. 9 Google Scholar; and Pap, A., Semantics and Necessary Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 432 Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Smart, J. J. C., Between Science and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 3–6 Google Scholar; Morgenbesser, S., “Introduction,” Philosophy of Science Today (Edited by Morgenbesser, S.; New York: Basic Books, 1967), p. xiii Google Scholar.

4 Toulmin, S., The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 7 Google Scholar. That Toulmin's interesting arguments involve (in any sense of the term) a rejection of Hempel's models of explanation is, at least in part, belied by the fact that I have made extensive use of Toulmin's insights in my forthcoming Introduction to Metapolitics: A Brief Inquiry into the Conceptual Language of Political Inquiry (Free Press) without abandoning the substance of Hempel's construal of scientific explanation. In effect, one can find Toulmin's arguments substantially correct and yet not abandon Hempel's models of scientific explanation.

5 Cf. Hempel, C. G., “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 3–51, particularly p. 51 Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., pp. 333–412, “Scientific Explanation,” in Morgenbesser, op. cit., pp. 79–88.

7 Gunnell, op. cit., p. 1241–42.

8 Toulmin, op. cit., pp. 168f.

9 Cf. Brodbeck, M., “General Introduction,” in Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (edited by Brodbeck, M.. New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 1–11 Google Scholar; Nagel, E., The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rudner, R., Philosophy of Social Science (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1966)Google Scholar.

10 Cf. Hempel, C.G., Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1966)Google Scholar.

11 For a discussion of “entrenchment,” cf. Goodman, N., Fact, Fiction and Forecast (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), chapter ivGoogle Scholar; for Hempel's acceptance of funded and contingent conditions for truth ascription in the case of substantive truths, vide his “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” op. cit.

12 Hempel, C. G., “Explanation and Prediction by Covering Laws,” in Philosophy of Science: The Delaware Seminar (edited by Baumrin, B.; New York: Wiley, 1963), pp. 125–132 Google Scholar.

13 Gunnell, op. cit., p. 1242.

14 Cf. Toulmin, S., The Philosophy of Science (London: Arrow, 1962), pp. 86 and 79 Google Scholar.

15 Alexander, H. Gavin, “General Statements as Rules of Inference,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (edited by Feigl, H., Scriven, M. and Maxwell, G.; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1958), II, pp. 309-29Google Scholar.

16 Scriven, M., Philosophical Review, XXIV (1955), 124–128 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 For a discussion of Thomas Kuhn's notion of "paradigms" in science, cf. Sheffler, I., Science and Subjectivity (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 74–89 Google Scholar and Gregor, op. cit., chapter 10.

18 This, on the face of it, seems to involve what has been called the process-product confusion—there is the process of explaining, which is an activity, and then there are products called explanations—in much the same way that we say we both swim and have a swim.

19 GuDnell, op. cit., p. 1242.

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