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Descriptive Completeness and Linguistic Variance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Alex C. Michalos
Alex C. Michalos
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

Recently Wesley Salmon has argued that a certain class of confirmation functions (C-functions) must be rejected for yielding contradictions. The C-functions involved happen to be the kind ingeniously constructed and employed most notably by Professor Carnap. More recently Keith Lehrer has argued that these C-functions may be salvaged by the adoption of a rule that eliminates certain languages. In the paragraphs that follow, it will be shown that Salmon's reply to the sort of program suggested by Lehrer is not at all convincing and that Lehrer's defence of his suggested rule of greater completeness is unacceptable.

Type
Discussions/Notes
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , September 1967 , pp. 224 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1967

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References

1 Salmon, Wesley C., “On Vindicating Induction,” Philosophy of Science, 30 (1963) p. 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Inductive Inference,” Philosophy of Science. The Delaware Seminar Vol. II, ed. Baumrin, B. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1963) pp. 363–366Google Scholar; “Vindication of Induction,” Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science, eds. Feigl, H. and Maxwell, G. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961) pp. 247–250.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Carnap, Rudolf, The Logical Foundations of Probability, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1950).Google Scholar

3 Lehrer, Keith, “Descriptive Completeness and Inductive Methods,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 28 (1963) pp. 157–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Lehrer, “Completeness,” pp. 157–158.

5 Salmon, “Vindicating Induction,” p. 254. CLI has roughly the same effect as Carnap's first adequacy condition in Foundations, p. 285 and Hempel's, C. G. “Equivalence Condition” in “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” Mind 54 (1945) p. 110.Google Scholar

6 Lehrer, “Completeness,” p. 158.

7 Ibid..

8 Salmon, “Vindicating Induction,” p. 260.

9 Ibid., p. 249.

10 Ibid., p. 256.

11 For discussion of this extremely problematic issue, see Hanson, N. R., Patterns of Discovery. (Cambridge: University Press, 1958)Google Scholar, Chapter I; P. K. Feyerabend, “How to Be a Good Empiricist — A Plea for Tolerance in Matters Epistemological,” Philosophy of Science. The Delaware Seminar Vol. II.; and Popper, Karl, Conjectures and Refutations, (New York: Basic Books, 1963) pp. 42–48.Google Scholar

12 Salmon, “Vindicating Induction,” pp. 256–261.