John Pheby, Methodology and Economics: A Critical Introduction (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1988), p 3.
Oberheim, Feyerabend's Philosophy (Walter de Gruyter, 2006), pp 80–82.
Sgarbi, Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism (Springer, 2013), pp 167–68.
Okasha, Philosophy of Science (Oxford U P, 2002), pp 91–93, esp pp 91–92: "In rebutting the charge that he had portrayed paradigm shifts as non-rational, Kuhn made the famous claim that there is 'no algorithm' for theory choice in science. What does this mean? An algorithm is a set of rules that allows us to compute the answer to a particular question. For example, an algorithm for multiplication is a set of rules that when applied to any two numbers tells us their product. (When you learn arithmetic in primary school, you in effect learn algorithms for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.) So an algorithm for theory choice is a set of rules that when applied to two competing theories would tell us which we should choose. Much positivist philosophy of science was in effect committed to the existence of such an algorithm. The positivists often wrote as if, given a set of data and two competing theories, the 'principles of scientific method' could be used to determine which theory was superior. This idea was implicit in their belief that although discovery was a matter of psychology, justification was a matter of logic. Kuhn's insistence that there is no algorithm for theory choice in science is almost certainly correct. Lots of philosophers and scientists have made plausible suggestions about what to look for in theories—simplicity, broadness of scope, close fit to the data, and so on. But these suggestions fall far short of providing a true algorithm, as Kuhn well knew.
McMullin, ch 2 in Lindberg & Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge U P, 1990), p 54.
McMullin, ch 2 in Lindberg & Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge U P, 1990), p 48.
McMullin, ch 2 in Lindberg & Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge U P, 1990), p 52: "Bacon rejects atomism because he believes that the corollary doctrines of the vacuum and the unchangeableness of the atoms are false (II, 8). But he asserts the existence of real imperceptible particles and other occult constituents of bodies (such as 'spirit'), upon which the observed properties of things depend (II, 7). But how are these to be known? He asks us not to be 'alarmed at the subtlety of the investigation', because 'the nearer it approaches to simple natures, the easier and plainer will everything become, the business being transferred from the complicated to the simple...as in the case of the letters of the alphabet and the notes of music' (II, 8). And then, somewhat tantalizingly, he adds: 'Inquiries into nature have the best result when they begin with physics and end with mathematics'. Bacon believes that the investigator can 'reduce the non-sensible to the sensible, that is, make manifest things not directly perceptible by means of others which are' (II, 40)".
Mill, A System of Logic (J W Parker, 1843), p 378: "It was, above all, by pointing out the insufficiency of this rude and loose conception of Induction, that Bacon merited the title so generally awarded to him, of the Founder of the Inductive Philosophy. The value of his own contributions to a more philosophical theory of the subject has certainly been exaggerated. Although (along with some fundamental errors) his writings contain, more or less fully developed, several of the most important principles of the Inductive Method, physical investigation has now far outgrown the Baconian model of Induction. Moral and political inquiry, indeed, are as yet far behind that conception. The current and approved modes of reasoning on these subjects are still of the same vicious description against which Bacon protested: the method almost exclusively employed by those professing to treat such matters inductively, is the very inductio per enumerationem simplicem which he condemns; and the experience, which we hear so confidently appealed to by all sects, parties, and interests, is still, in his own emphatic words, mera palpatio.
Bolotin, Approach to Aristotle's Physics (SUNY P, 1998), p 1.
Roberto Torretti, The Philosophy of Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p 436.
Chhanda Chakraborti, Logic: Informal, Symbolic and Inductive (New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India, 2007), p 381.
Flew, Dictionary (St Martin's, 1984), "Hume", p 156.
McWherter, The Problem of Critical Ontology (Palgrave, 2013), p 38: "Since Hume reduces objects of experience to spatiotemporally individuated instances of sensation with no necessary connection to each other (atomistic events), the closest they can come to a causal relation is a regularly repeated succession (constant conjunction), while for Kant the task of transcendental synthesis is to bestow unity and necessary connections upon the atomistic and contingently related contributions of sensibility".
Gattei, Karl Popper's Philosophy of Science (Routledge, 2009), pp 28–29.
Flew, Dictionary (St Martin's, 1984), "Hume", p 154: "Like Kant, Hume sees himself as conducting an anti-Copernican counter-revolution. Through his investigations of the heavens, Copernicus knocked the Earth, and by implication man, from the centre of the Universe. Hume's study of our human nature was to put that at the centre of every map of knowledge".
Redman, Rise of Political Economy as a Science (MIT P, 1997), p 183.
Flew, Dictionary (St Martin's, 1984), "Hume's fork", p 156.
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Pocket Books, 2006), p 457
Delanty, Social Science (U Minnesota P, 1997), pp 26, 29.
Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd edn (New York: St Martin's Press, 1984), "positivism", p 283.
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Pocket Books, 2006), p 458
Delanty, Social Science (U Minnesota P, 1997), pp 26–27.
Blaug, Methodology of Economics, 2nd edn (Cambridge U P, 1992), ch 3 "The verificationists, a largely nineteenth-century story", p 51.
Flew, Dictionary (St Martin's, 1984), "Mill's methods", p 232.
George Cooper, The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles and the Efficient Market Fallacy (Hampshire GB: Harriman House, 2008), p 64: "Once again, John Maynard Keynes appears in the story. Following World War I, Keynes became a part of the team responsible for imposing the peace settlement on the defeated Germany. Recognising that the proposed reparations demanded of Germany would bankrupt the country, Keynes resigned his position, and wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, explaining the problem. Keynes was ignored, the treaty was imposed, and as predicted, Germany was bankrupted. As part of the reparations process, the German government was forced to pay away a large part of the gold reserves that back its currency. They payments, coupled with the government resorting to printing still more currency, produced a spiralling hyperinflation. The resultant economic collapse is today recognised as being a significant element in the subsequent rise of extremism. In a nutshell—World War II was in part born from poor economic and monetary policy as a result of the treaty which ended WWI, and which Keynes opposed".
Fulvio Melia, The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp 83–87.
Crelinsten, Einstein's Jury (Princeton U P, 2006), p 28.
Grundmann & Stehr, Power of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge U P, 2012), pp 77–80.
Delanty, Social Science (U Minnesota P, 1997), pp 29–30.
Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: (U Chicago P, 2003), pp 24–25.
Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge U P, 1999), pp 2–5.
Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge U P, 1999), p xii.
In 1739, Hume cast a fork aggressively dividing "relations of ideas" from "matters of fact and real existence", such that all truths are of one type or the other. Truths by relations among ideas (abstract) all align on one side (analytic, necessary, a priori). Truths by states of actualities (concrete) always align on the other side (synthetic, contingent, a posteriori). At any treatises containing neither, Hume orders, "Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion".
Challenges to scientific realism are captured succinctly by Bolotin, Approach to Aristotle's Physics (SUNY P, 1998), p 33–34, commenting about modern science, "But it has not succeeded, of course, in encompassing all phenomena, at least not yet. For it laws are mathematical idealizations, idealizations, moreover, with no immediate basis in experience and with no evident connection to the ultimate causes of the natural world. For instance, Newton's first law of motion (the law of inertia) requires us to imagine a body that is always at rest or else moving aimlessly in a straight line at a constant speed, even though we never see such a body, and even though according to his own theory of universal gravitation, it is impossible that there can be one. This fundamental law, then, which begins with a claim about what would happen in a situation that never exists, carries no conviction except insofar as it helps to predict observable events. Thus, despite the amazing success of Newton's laws in predicting the observed positions of the planets and other bodies, Einstein and Infeld are correct to say, in The Evolution of Physics, that 'we can well imagine another system, based on different assumptions, might work just as well'. Einstein and Infeld go on to assert that 'physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world'. To illustrate what they mean by this assertion, they compare the modern scientist to a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. If he is ingenious, they acknowledge, this man 'may form some picture of a mechanism which would be responsible for all the things he observes'. But they add that he 'may never quite be sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison'. In other words, modern science cannot claim, and it will never be able to claim, that it has the definite understanding of any natural phenomenon".
Okasha, Philosophy of Science (Oxford U P, 2002), p 62: "Strictly we should distinguish two sorts of anti-realism. According to the first sort, talk of unobservable entities is not to be understood literally at all. So when a scientist pus forward a theory about electrons, for example, we should not take him to be asserting the existence of entities called 'electrons'. Rather, his talk of electrons is metaphorical. This form of anti-realism was popular in the first half of the 20th century, but few people advocate it today. It was motivated largely by a doctrine in the philosophy of language, according to which it is not possible to make meaningful assertions about things that cannot in principle be observed, a doctrine that few contemporary philosophers accept. The second sort of anti-realism accepts that talk of unobservable entities should be taken at face value: if a theory says that electrons are negatively charged, it is true if electrons do exist and are negatively charged, but false otherwise. But we will never know which, says the anti-realist. So the correct attitude towards the claims that scientists make about unobservable reality is one of total agnosticism. They are either true or false, but we are incapable of finding out which. Most modern anti-realism is of this second sort".
Hacohen, Karl Popper—The Formative Years (Cambridge U P, 2000), p 279.
Mary Hesse, "Bayesian methods and the initial probabilities of theories", pp 50–105, in Maxwell & Anderson, eds (U Minnesota P, 1975), p 100: "There are two major contending concepts for the task of explicating the simplicity of hypotheses, which may be described respectively as the concepts of content and economy. First, the theory is usually required to have high power or content; to be at once general and specific, and to make precise and detailed claims about the state of the world; that is, in Popper's terminology, to be highly falsifiable. This, as Popper maintains against all probabilistic theories of induction, has the consequence that good theories should be in general improbable, since the more claims a theory makes on the world, other things being equal, the less likely it is to be true. On the other hand, as would be insisted by inductivists, a good theory is one that is more likely than its rivals to be true, and in particular it is frequently assumed that simple theories are preferable because they require fewer premises and fewer concepts, and hence would appear to make fewer claims than more complex rivals about the state of the world, and hence be more probable".
Karl Popper, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2009), p 20.
Andrews, Keynes and the British Humanist Tradition (Routledge, 2010), pp 63–65.
Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge U P, 1999), p 1.
Hacohen, Karl Popper: The Formative Years (Cambridge U P, 2000), pp 212–13.
Caldwell, Beyond Positivism (Routledge, 1994), p 47–48.
Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge U P, 1988), pp 526–27.
Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge, 1999), p 2.
Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge U P, 1988), p 546.
Karl Popper, ch 4, subch "Science: Conjectures and refutations", in Andrew Bailey, ed, First Philosophy: Fundamental Problems and Readings in Philosophy, 2nd edn (Peterborough Ontario: Broadview Press, 2011), pp 338–42.
Miran Epstein, ch 2 "Introduction to philosophy of science", in Seale, ed, Researching Society and Culture (Sage, 2012). pp 18–19.
Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality (U Chicago P, 2003), p 57–59.
Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality (U Chicago P, 2003), p 57–59.
Oswald Hanfling, ch 5 "Logical positivism", in Shanker, ed, Philosophy of Science, Logic and Mathematics (Routledge, 1996), pp 193–94.
Okasha, Philosophy of Science (Oxford U P, 2002), p 23, virtually admonishes Popper: "Most philosophers think it's obvious that science relies heavily on inductive reasoning, indeed so obvious that it hardly needs arguing for. But, remarkably, this was denied by philosopher Karl Popper, whom we met in the last chapter. Popper claimed that scientists only need to use deductive inferences. This would be nice if it were true, for deductive inferences are much safer than inductive ones, as we have seen.
"Popper's basic argument is this. Although it is not possible to prove that a scientific theory is true from a limited data sample, it is possible to prove that a theory is false. . . . So if a scientist is only interested in demonstrating that a given theory is false, she may be able to accomplish her goal without the use of inductive inferences."The weakness of Popper's argument is obvious. For scientists are not only interested in showing that certain theories are false. When a scientist collects experimental data, her aim might be to show that a particular theory—her arch-rival's theory, perhaps—is false. But much more likely, she is trying to convince people that her own theory is true. And in order to do that, she will have to resort to inductive reasoning of some sort. So Popper's attempt to show that science can get by without induction does not succeed".And yet immediately before this, pp 22–23, Okasha explains that when reporting scientists' work, news media ought to report it correctly as attainment of scientific evidence, not proof: "The central role of induction is science is sometimes obscured by the way we talk. For example, you might read a newspaper report that says that scientists have found 'experimental proof' that genetically modified maize is safe for humans. What this means is that the scientists have tested the maize on a large number of humans, and none of them have come to any harm [that the investigators recognized, measured, and reported]. But strictly speaking, this doesn't prove that maize is safe, in the same sense in which mathematicians can prove Pythagoras' theorem, say. For the inference from the maize didn't harm any of the people on whom it was tested to the maize will not harm anyone is inductive, not deductive. The newspaper report should really have said that scientists have found extremely good evidence that the maize is safe for humans. The word proof should strictly be used only when we are dealing with deductive inferences. In this strict sense of the word, scientific hypotheses can rarely, if ever be proved true by the data".
Likewise, Popper maintains that properly, nor do scientists try to mislead people to believe that whichever theory, law, or principle is proved either naturally real (ontic truth) or universally true (epistemic truth).
Gillies, in Rethinking Popper (Springer, 2009), pp 103–05.
Okasha, Philosophy of Science (Oxford U P, 2002), p 22, summarizes that geneticists "examined a large number of DS sufferers and found that each had an additional chromosome. They then reasoned inductively to the conclusion that all DS sufferers, including the ones they hadn't examined, have an additional chromosome. It is easy to see that this inference is inductive. The fact that the DS sufferers in the sample studied had 47 chromosomes doesn't prove that all DS suffers do. It is possible, though unlikely, that they sample was an unrepresentative one.
"This example is by no means isolated. In effect, scientists use inductive reasoning whenever they move from limited data to a more general conclusion, which they do all the time. Consider, for example, Newton's principle of universal gravitation, encountered in the last chapter, which says that every body in the universe exerts a gravitational attraction on every other body. Now obviously, Newton did not arrive at this principle by examining every single body in the whole universe—he couldn't possibly have. Rather, he saw that the principle held true for the planets and the Sun, and for objects of various sorts moving near the Earth's surface. From this data, he inferred that the principle held true for all bodies. Again, this inference was obviously an inductive one: the fact that Newton's principle holds true for some bodies doesn't guaranteed that it holds true for all bodies".
Some pages later, however, Okasha finds enumerative induction insufficient to explain phenomena, a task for which scientists employ IBE, guided by no clear rules, although parsimony, that is, simplicity, is a common heuristic despite no particular assurance that nature is "simple" [pp 29–32]. Okasha then notes the unresolved dispute among philosophers over whether enumerative induction is a consequence of IBE, a view that Okasha, omitting Popper from mention, introduces by noting, "The philosopher Gilbert Harman has argued that IBE is more fundamental" p 32. Yet other philosophers have asserted the converse—that IBE derives from enumerative induction, more fundamental—and, although inference could in principle work both ways, the dispute is unresolved [p 32].
Gillies, in Rethinking Popper (Springer, 2009), p 111: "I argued earlier that there are some exceptions to Popper's claim that rules of inductive inference do not exist. However, these exceptions are relatively rare. They occur, for example, in the machine learning programs of AI. For the vast bulk of human science both past and present, rules of inductive inference do not exist. For such science, Popper's model of conjectures which are freely invented and then tested out seems to me more accurate than any model based on inductive inferences. Admittedly, there is talk nowadays in the context of science carried out by humans of 'inference to the best explanation' or 'abductive inference', but such so-called inferences are not at all inferences based on precisely formulated rules like the deductive rules of inference. Those who talk of 'inference to the best explanation' or 'abductive inference', for example, never formulate any precise rules according to which these so-called inferences take place. In reality, the 'inferences' which they describe in their examples involve conjectures thought up by human ingenuity and creativity, and by no means inferred in any mechanical fashion, or according to precisely specified rules".
Gauch, Scientific Method in Practice (Cambridge, 2003), p 159.
Although unfalsifiable was Popper's criterion of simply the unscientific—which adds supposedly empirical evidence of truth in order to become pseudoscientific—it has been commonly misrepresented that unfalsifiable itself was Popper's criterion of pseudoscientific. As example of such misstatement, see Massimo Pigliucci, ch 1 "The demarcation problem", in Pigliucci & Boudry, eds, Philosophy of Pseudoscience (U Chicago P, 2013), pp 9–10.
Stahl et al, Webs of Reality (Rutgers U P, 2002), p 180.
See Gauch, Scientific Method in Practice (Cambridge U P, 2003), p 81, as an example.
Bem & de Jong, Theoretical Issues in Psychology (SAGE, 2006), pp 45–47.
Torretti, Philosophy of Physics (Cambridge U P, 1999), p 221: "Twentieth-century positivists would maintain, of course, that the rules of inductive logic are not meant to preside over the process of discovery, but to control the validity of its findings".
Curtis, Ron (August 1994). "Narrative Form and Normative Force: Baconian Story-Telling in Popular Science". Social Studies of Science. 24 (3): 419–461. doi:10.1177/030631279402400301.
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Friis, Herman R. (1942). "Review of Wilderness Chronicles of Northwestern Pennsylvania; Pen Pictures of Early Western Pennsylvania; The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania". Geographical Review. 32 (3): 512–513. doi:10.2307/210401. JSTOR210401.
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Greenland, S (August 1998). "Induction versus Popper: substance versus semantics". International Journal of Epidemiology. 27 (4): 543–548. doi:10.1093/ije/27.4.543. PMID9758105.
Fetzer, "Carl Hempel", §2.1 "The analytic/synthetic distinction", in SEP: "Empiricism historically stands in opposition to Rationalism, which is represented most prominently by Immanuel Kant, who argued that the mind, in processing experiences, imposes certain properties on whatever we experience, including what he called Forms of Intuition and Categories of Understanding. The Forms of Intuition impose Euclidean spatial relations and Newtonian temporal relations; the Categories of Understanding require objects to be interpreted as substances, and causes as inherently deterministic. Several developments in the history of science, such as the emergence of the theory of relativity and of quantum mechanics, undermine Kant's position by introducing the role of frames of reference and of probabilistic causation. Newer versions are associated with Noam Chomsky and with Jerry Fodor, who have championed the ideas of an innate syntax and innate semantics, respectively (Chomsky 1957; Fodor 1975; Chomsky 1986)".
Michel Bourdeau, "Auguste Comte", in Edward N Zalta, ed, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2014 edn.
Fetzer, "Carl Hempel", §2 "The critique of logical positivism", in SEP: "However surprising it may initially seem, contemporary developments in the philosophy of science can only be properly appreciated in relation to the historical background of logical positivism. Hempel himself attained a certain degree of prominence as a critic of this movement. Language, Truth and Logic (1936; 2nd edition, 1946), authored by A J Ayer, offers a lucid exposition of the movement, which was—with certain variations—based upon the analytic/synthetic distinction, the observational/theoretical distinction, and the verifiability criterion of meaningfulness".
Chakravartty, "Scientific realism", §1.2 "The three dimensions of realist commitment", in SEP: "Semantically, realism is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world. In common parlance, realists take theoretical statements at 'face value'. According to realism, claims about scientific entities, processes, properties, and relations, whether they be observable or unobservable, should be construed literally as having truth values, whether true or false. This semantic commitment contrasts primarily with those of so-called instrumentalist epistemologies of science, which interpret descriptions of unobservables simply as instruments for the prediction of observable phenomena, or for systematizing observation reports. Traditionally, instrumentalism holds that claims about unobservable things have no literal meaning at all (though the term is often used more liberally in connection with some antirealist positions today). Some antirealists contend that claims involving unobservables should not be interpreted literally, but as elliptical for corresponding claims about observables".
Chakravartty, "Scientific realism", §4 "Antirealism: Foils for scientific realism", §§4.1 "Empiricism", in SEP: "Traditionally, instrumentalists maintain that terms for unobservables, by themselves, have no meaning; construed literally, statements involving them are not even candidates for truth or falsity. The most influential advocates of instrumentalism were the logical empiricists (or logical positivists), including Carnap and Hempel, famously associated with the Vienna Circle group of philosophers and scientists as well as important contributors elsewhere. In order to rationalize the ubiquitous use of terms which might otherwise be taken to refer to unobservables in scientific discourse, they adopted a non-literal semantics according to which these terms acquire meaning by being associated with terms for observables (for example, 'electron' might mean 'white streak in a cloud chamber'), or with demonstrable laboratory procedures (a view called 'operationalism'). Insuperable difficulties with this semantics led ultimately (in large measure) to the demise of logical empiricism and the growth of realism. The contrast here is not merely in semantics and epistemology: a number of logical empiricists also held the neo-Kantian view that ontological questions 'external' to the frameworks for knowledge represented by theories are also meaningless (the choice of a framework is made solely on pragmatic grounds), thereby rejecting the metaphysical dimension of scientific realism|realism (as in Carnap 1950)".
Fetzer, "Carl Hempel", §3 "Scientific reasoning", in SEP: "The need to dismantle the verifiability criterion of meaningfulness together with the demise of the observational/theoretical distinction meant that logical positivism no longer represented a rationally defensible position. At least two of its defining tenets had been shown to be without merit. Since most philosophers believed that Quine had shown the analytic/synthetic distinction was also untenable, moreover, many concluded that the enterprise had been a total failure. Among the important benefits of Hempel's critique, however, was the production of more general and flexible criteria of cognitive significance in Hempel (1965b), included in a famous collection of his studies, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965d). There he proposed that cognitive significance could not be adequately captured by means of principles of verification or falsification, whose defects were parallel, but instead required a far more subtle and nuanced approach.
"Hempel suggested multiple criteria for assessing the cognitive significance of different theoretical systems, where significance is not categorical but rather a matter of degree: 'Significant systems range from those whose entire extralogical vocabulary consists of observation terms, through theories whose formulation relies heavily on theoretical constructs, on to systems with hardly any bearing on potential empirical findings' (Hempel 1965b: 117).
"The criteria Hempel offered for evaluating the 'degrees of significance' of theoretical systems (as conjunctions of hypotheses, definitions, and auxiliary claims) were (a) the clarity and precision with which they are formulated, including explicit connections to observational language; (b) the systematic—explanatory and predictive—power of such a system, in relation to observable phenomena; (c) the formal simplicity of the systems with which a certain degree of systematic power is attained; and (d) the extent to which those systems have been confirmed by experimental evidence (Hempel 1965b). The elegance of Hempel's study laid to rest any lingering aspirations for simple criteria of 'cognitive significance' and signaled the demise of logical positivism as a philosophical movement.
"Precisely what remained, however, was in doubt. Presumably, anyone who rejected one or more of the three principles defining positivism—the analytic/synthetic distinction, the observational/theoretical distinction, and the verifiability criterion of significance—was not a logical positivist. The precise outlines of its philosophical successor, which would be known as 'logical empiricism', were not entirely evident. Perhaps this study came the closest to defining its intellectual core. Those who accepted Hempel's four criteria and viewed cognitive significance as a matter of degree were members, at least in spirit. But some new problems were beginning to surface with respect to Hempel's covering-law explication of explanation, and old problems remained from his studies of induction, the most remarkable of which was known as 'the paradox of confirmation'".
Fetzer, "Carl Hempel", §2.3 "The verifiability criterion of cognitive significance", in SEP: "Hempel (1950, 1951), meanwhile, demonstrated that the verifiability criterion could not be sustained. Since it restricts empirical knowledge to observation sentences and their deductive consequences, scientific theories are reduced to logical constructions from observables. In a series of studies about cognitive significance and empirical testability, he demonstrated that the verifiability criterion implies that existential generalizations are meaningful, but that universal generalizations are not, even though they include general laws, the principal objects of scientific discovery. Hypotheses about relative frequencies in finite sequences are meaningful, but hypotheses concerning limits in infinite sequences are not. The verifiability criterion thus imposed a standard that was too strong to accommodate the characteristic claims of science and was not justifiable.
"Indeed, on the assumption that a sentence S is meaningful if and only if its negation is meaningful, Hempel demonstrated that the criterion produced consequences that were counterintuitive if not logically inconsistent. The sentence, 'At least one stork is red-legged', for example, is meaningful because it can be verified by observing one red-legged stork; yet its negation, 'It is not the case that even one stork is red-legged', cannot be shown to be true by observing any finite number of red-legged storks and is therefore not meaningful. Assertions about God or The Absolute were meaningless by this criterion, since they are not observation statements or deducible from them. They concern entities that are non-observable. That was a desirable result. But by the same standard, claims that were made by scientific laws and theories were also meaningless.
"Indeed, scientific theories affirming the existence of gravitational attractions and of electromagnetic fields were thus rendered comparable to beliefs about transcendent entities such as an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent God, for example, because no finite sets of observation sentences are sufficient to deduce the existence of entities of those kinds. These considerations suggested that the logical relationship between scientific theories and empirical evidence cannot be exhausted by means of observation sentences and their deductive consequences alone, but needs to include observation sentences and their inductive consequences as well (Hempel 1958). More attention would now be devoted to the notions of testability and of confirmation and disconfirmation as forms of partial verification and partial falsification, where Hempel would recommend an alternative to the standard conception of scientific theories to overcome otherwise intractable problems with the observational/theoretical distinction".
Uebel, "Vienna Circle", §3.3 "Reductionism and foundationalism: Two criticisms partly rebutted", in SEP: "But for a brief lapse around 1929/30, then, the post-AufbauCarnap fully represents the position of Vienna Circle anti-foundationalism. In this he joined Neurath whose long-standing anti-foundationalism is evident from his famous simile likening scientists to sailors who have to repair their boat without ever being able to pull into dry dock (1932b). Their positions contrasted at least prima facie with that of Schlick (1934) who explicitly defended the idea of foundations in the Circle's protocol-sentence debate. Even Schlick conceded, however, that all scientific statements were fallible ones, so his position on foundationalism was by no means the traditional one. The point of his 'foundations' remained less than wholly clear and different interpretation of it have been put forward. ... While all in the Circle thus recognized as futile the attempt to restore certainty to scientific knowledge claims, not all members embraced positions that rejected foundationalism tout court. Clearly, however, attributing foundationalist ambitions to the Circle as a whole constitutes a total misunderstanding of its internal dynamics and historical development, if it does not bespeak wilfull ignorance. At most, a foundationalist faction around Schlick can be distinguished from the so-called left wing whose members pioneered anti-foundationalism with regard to both the empirical and formal sciences".
Poston, "Foundationalism", §b "Theories of proper inference", §§iii "Liberal inductivism", in IEP: "Strict inductivism is motivated by the thought that we have some kind of inferential knowledge of the world that cannot be accommodated by deductive inference from epistemically basic beliefs. A fairly recent debate has arisen over the merits of strict inductivism. Some philosophers have argued that there are other forms of nondeductive inference that do not fit the model of enumerative induction. C S Peirce describes a form of inference called 'abduction' or 'inference to the best explanation'. This form of inference appeals to explanatory considerations to justify belief. One infers, for example, that two students copied answers from a third because this is the best explanation of the available data—they each make the same mistakes and the two sat in view of the third. Alternatively, in a more theoretical context, one infers that there are very small unobservable particles because this is the best explanation of Brownian motion. Let us call 'liberal inductivism' any view that accepts the legitimacy of a form of inference to the best explanation that is distinct from enumerative induction. For a defense of liberal inductivism, see Gilbert Harman's classic (1965) paper. Harman defends a strong version of liberal inductivism according to which enumerative induction is just a disguised form of inference to the best explanation".
Poston, "Foundationalism", § intro, in IEP: "The Neurath–Schlick debate transformed into a discussion over nature and role of observation sentences within a theory. Quine (1951) extended this debate with his metaphor of the web of belief in which observation sentences are able to confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis only in connection with a larger theory. Sellars (1963) criticizes foundationalism as endorsing a flawed model of the cognitive significance of experience. Following the work of Quine and Sellars, a number of people arose to defend foundationalism (see section below on modest foundationalism). This touched off a burst of activity on foundationalism in the late 1970s to early 1980s. One of the significant developments from this period is the formulation and defense of reformed epistemology, a foundationalist view that took, as the foundations, beliefs such as there is a God (see Plantinga (1983)). While the debate over foundationalism has abated in recent decades, new work has picked up on neglected topics about the architecture of knowledge and justification".
Poston, "Foundationalism", § intro, in IEP: "The debate over foundationalism was reinvigorated in the early part of the twentieth century by the debate over the nature of the scientific method. Otto Neurath (1959; original 1932) argued for a view of scientific knowledge illuminated by the raft metaphor according to which there is no privileged set of statements that serve as the ultimate foundation; rather knowledge arises out of a coherence among the set of statements we accept. In opposition to this raft metaphor, Moritz Schlick (1959; original 1932) argued for a view of scientific knowledge akin to the pyramid image in which knowledge rests on a special class of statements whose verification doesn't depend on other beliefs".
