L. Jonathan Cohen

The anatomy of inquiry : philosophical studies in the theory of science

Introduction: Philosophy and the Theory of Science 1. Approaches to the Philosophy of Science 2. Arguments of a Theory of Science 3. Approach to the Problems Part I: Explanation 1. The Humean Background 2. The Deductive Pattern of Explanation 3. Statistical and Confirmational Generalization 4, The Structural Divergence of Explanation and Prediction 5. The Centrality of Explanation and Prediction 6. The Problem of Ontological Interpretation 7. Explanation of Psychological and Historical Events 8. Teleological Explanation: Beliefs and Desires 9. Teleological Explanation: Self-regulating Behavior Part II: Significance 1. Explanation and Criteria of Significance 2. Conditions of Adequacy for Defining and Criterion 3. Criteria Based on Complete Verifiability or Falsifiability 4. Falsifiability as Criterion of Significance and as Criterion of Demarcation 5. Criteria of Incomplete Verifiability 6. Criteria of Translatability 7. Inclusion in an Empiricist Language 8. Disposition Terms, Observational Predicates, and Observable Elements 9. The Interpretation of Disposition Terms 10. The Method of Reduction Sentences 11. The Problem of Theoretical Terms 12. The Problem of Function and the Problem of Interpretation 13. Approaches to the problem of Interpretation: Pragmatism and Fictionalism 14. Pragmatism 15. Fictionalism and Its Varieties 16. Instrumentalistic Fictionalism 17. Empiricism, Pragmatism, and Instrumentalism 18. Eliminative Fictionalism 19. Eliminative Fictionalism: Syntactical Form 20. Eliminative Fictionalism: Craigian Form 21. Eliminative Fictionalism: Ramseyan Form Part III: Confirmation 1. Explanation, Significance, and Confirmation 2. Humes Challenge and the Generalization Formula 3. Hempels Study of Qualitative Confirmation 4. Critical Discussion of the Satisfaction Criterion 5. The Paradoxes of Confirmation: Hempels Treatment 6. Further Discussions of the Paradoxes of Confirmation 7. Positive Instances and the Generalization Formula 8. Induction and Projectibility 9. Goodmans Proposal on Induction 10. Reflections on the Justification of Induction Bibliography Index

The Probable and the Provable.

The book was planned and written as a single, sustained argument. But earlier versions of a few parts of it have appeared separately. The object of this book is both to establish the existence of the paradoxes, and also to describe a non-Pascalian concept of probability in terms of which one can analyse the structure of forensic proof without giving rise to such typical signs of theoretical misfit. Neither the complementational principle for negation nor the multiplicative principle for conjunction applies to the central core of any forensic proof in the Anglo-American legal system. There are four parts included in this book. Accordingly, these parts have been written in such a way that they may be read in different orders by different kinds of reader.

On The Use Of “The Use Of”

IN the Philosophical Review of April, I953 (PP. I67 ff.), Professor Ryle has drawn an interesting analogy between the use of words and the use of instruments or implements. He holds that this analogy helps us in two ways. Firstly, by asking What is the use of that word? rather than What is its meaning? we are not lead to suppose that for every word there is a correlate entity which is its meaning. Secondly, if we regard using words as exercising a technique, we admit that words can be misused as well as properly used; and part, at least, of a philosophers task, on Ryles view, is to give an account of these proper uses. I want to argue that Ryles instrumentalist analogy is unnecessary as an aid to the first of these two policies and inadequate to justify the second. I intend this paper, however, as an inquiry into the relation between certain uses of the English word use, or of equivalent words in other languages, rather than as a discussion of philosophical method or of the problem of meaning. Just as the analogy between meaning and naming was misleading because it encouraged belief in fairylands of subsistent entities, the analogy between words and tools is misleading, I shall argue, because it encourages belief in a mythical guild of speech-craftsmen-a guild of which everybody but infants and idiots are members and all rightthinking philosophers are the self-appointed wardens, investigating the competences of members and exposing professional howlers to general ridicule. Certainly it is often helpful to treat the analysis of concepts as an inquiry into the logical relations between uses of words. But tool-names, as I shall emphasize, are far from being the only accusatives which follow the English verb to use or equivalent verbs in other languages. Let us begin by considering some of the many ways in which the use of words is not like the use of boots, tennis-rackets, tug-of-war ropes, coins, postage-stamps, cheques, sphygmomanometers or fishknives (to mention some of the items in Ryles simile), and unlike them in the way that logical consequences are unlike causal sequences rather than in the way that Bank of England notes are unlike gold sovereigns. i. Some words, as Ryle has sometimes reminded us, have both a technical and a non-technical use. When a judge rules that hearsay is not evidence, I suppose, he does not imply that no-one should ever seek knowledge from, say, newspaper reports of public lectures. For the judges use of the word evidence is a special, technical use,

The Development of Logic.

The primary purpose of this book has not been to recount all that past scholars have said about the science, but rather to record the first appearances of those ideas which seem most important in the logic of our own day.