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Discussion: On a Claim By Skyrms Concerning Lawlikeness and Confirmation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Carl G. Hempel
Carl G. Hempel*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

In his article [5], Brian Skyrms adduces (on p. 233) some generalizations which, he claims, receive no confirmatory support from their positive instances even though all the predicates they contain are well entrenched in Goodman's sense. Invoking the principle that “a generalization is lawlike if it is capable of receiving confirmatory support from its positive instances” (p. 232; actually, the converse is needed and, I will assume, intended by him), he claims that his examples “provide striking demonstration of the fact that the lawlikeness of a hypothesis is not a simple function of the projectibility of its constituent predicates.” I think the claim is of great interest; but I will try to show that Skyrms's argument fails to establish it because it presupposes an unwarranted assumption which raises a problem of general importance for confirmation theory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , September 1968 , pp. 274 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1968

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Footnotes

†

Preparation of this note was supported by a research grant from the National Science Foundation.

References

REFERENCES

[1] Carnap, R., Logical Foundations of Probability, The University of Chicago Press, 1950.Google Scholar
[2] Goodman, N., Fact, Fiction and Forecast, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1955. Second edition, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis, 1965.Google Scholar
[3] Hempel, C. G., “A Purely Syntactical Definition of Confirmation,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 8, 1943, pp. 122–143.10.2307/2271053CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[4] Hempel, C. G., “Studies in the Logic of Confirmation,” Mind, vol. 54, 1945, pp. 1–26 and 97–121; reprinted with some addenda in Hempel, C. G., Aspects of Scientific Explanation, The Free Press, New York, 1965, pp. 3–51.Google Scholar
[5] Skyrms, B., “Nomological Necessity and the Paradoxes of Confirmation,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 33, 1966, pp. 230–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar