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A purely syntactical definition of confirmation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Carl G. Hempel
Carl G. Hempel*
Affiliation:
Queens College, Flushing, N. Y.
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Extract

The concept of confirmation occupies a central position in the methodology of empirical science. For it is the distinctive characteristic of an empirical hypothesis to be amenable, at least in principle, to a test based on suitable observations or experiments; the empirical data obtained in a test—or, as we shall prefer to say, the observation sentences describing those data—may then either confirm or disconfirm the given hypothesis, or they may be neutral with respect to it. To say that certain observation sentences confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis, does not, of course, generally mean that those observation sentences suffice strictly to prove or to refute the hypothesis in question, but rather that they constitute favorable, or unfavorable, evidence for it; and the term “neutral” is to indicate that the observation sentences are either entirely irrelevant to the hypothesis, or at least insufficient to strengthen or weaken it.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , December 1943 , pp. 122 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1944

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Footnotes

1

A modified and expanded version of a paper of the same title of which an abstract appeared in this Journal, vol. 8 (1943), p. 39. The earlier version was scheduled to be read at the meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic that was to have taken place at Yale University in December 1942.

References

2 A detailed discussion of the various methodological aspects of the problem of confirmation will be given in a separate paper, to be published elsewhere, by the present author and Dr. Paul Oppenheim. It is the study, with Mr. Oppenheim, of these broader issues which suggested the problem of defining confirmation in logical terms.

3 Cf. Carnap, R., The logical syntax of language, 1937, §1.Google Scholar

4 Such as those of J. M. Keynes, J. Nicod, H. Jeffreys, B. O. Koopman, St. Mazurkiewicz, and others.

5 Cf. particularly Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Janina, On confirmation, this Journal, vol. 5 (1940), pp. 133–148.Google Scholar

6 For detailed statements of suitable sets of rules see, for example, Carnap, R., Formalizalion of logic, Cambridge, Mass., 1943, p. 135 ff.Google Scholar; and especially Hilbert, D. and Bernays, P., Grundlagen der Mathematik, Vol. I, Berlin, 1934, §4.Google Scholar—Carnap's system involves reference to primitive sentential schemata.

7 A criterion to essentially this effect was formulated by Nicod, Jean in Foundations of geometry and induction, London 1930, p. 219.Google Scholar

8 With respect to the equivalence condition, this difficulty was exhibited already in the author's Le problème de la vérité, Theoria (Göteborg), vol. 3 (1937), pp. 206–246, esp. p. 222.

9 This idea of defining confirmation in terms of an “inclusion criterion” was suggested to me by Dr. Nelson Goodman as offering considerable advantages over an attempt which I had made before to define confirmation in terms of “inductive attainability” of S from B—an approach which is not discussed in the present paper. Dr. Goodman's idea proved an invaluable help for the present investigation; in fact, it initiated all the following considerations.

10 Cf. Hilbert and Bernays, loc. cit., p. 156, or Carnap, loc. cit. (see footnote 6), p. 142, T 28–11.

11 Cf. Hilbert and Bernays, loc. cit., p. 121, Theorem 1.

12 Cf. Hilbert and Bernays, loc. cit., pp. 185–186.

13 Cf. Hilbert and Bernays, loc. cit., p. 155.

14 Cf. Hilbert and Bernays, loc. cit., p. 106, schema α.

15 Cf. Hilbert and Bernays, loc. cit., p. 106, schema α.

16 Cf. Hilbert and Bernays, loc. cit., p. 121, Theorem 1, and the statement on satisfiability, p. 128, second paragraph.