This paper has three interdependent aims. The first is to make Reichenbach’s views on induction and probabilities clearer, especially as they pertain to his pragmatic justification of induction. The second aim is to show how his view of pragmatic justification arises out of his commitment to extensional empiricism and moots the possibility of a non-pragmatic justification of induction. Finally, and most importantly, a formal decision-theoretic account of Reichenbach’s pragmatic justification is offered in terms both of the minimax principle and the (...) dominance principle. (shrink)

It is a commonplace of the history of analytic philosophy that Carnap swiftly adopted Tarskian semantics in the mid-1930s. There is no doubt that, in a very general sense, this is true. But to what extent are the innovative technical details characteristic of Tarski's method, specifically the handling of quantification by way of a satisfaction relation between formulas and variable assignments, reflected in Carnap's writings on semantics? Curiously enough, their essentials are in place just before Carnap took the purported Tarskian (...) turn, namely in the definition of analyticity he formulated some time between September 1932 and April 1933, but are missing from his publications on semantics after 1935 until the final chapter of Meaning and Necessity of 1947, at which point we find Carnap reverting to the use of specifically Tarskian techniques in the context of his novel semantics for quantified modal languages. (shrink)