: Any precise version of H-D needs to handle various problems, most notably, the problem of selective confirmation: Precise formulations of H-D should not have the consequence that where S confirms T, for any T', S confirms T&T'. It is the perceived failure of H-D to solve such problems that has lead John Earman to recently conclude that H-D is "very nearly a dead horse". This suggests the following state of play: H-D is an intuitively plausible idea that breaks down (...) in the attempt to give it a precise formulation. Indeed I think that fairly captures the view among specialists in the field of confirmation theory. Here I argue that the truth about H-D is largely the reverse: H-D can be given a precise formulation that avoids the longstanding technical problems, however, it relies on a fundamentally unsound philosophical intuition. The bulk of this paper involves reviewing the problems affecting previous attempts at giving precise formulations of H-D and displaying some recent versions that can handle these problems. It then briefly explains why the basic intuition behind H-D is itself unsound, namely, because H-D involves a tacit assumption of inductive scepticism. Finally, the historical relation between H-D and the positivists' quest for a criterion of empirical significance will be reconsidered with the surprising result that having glossed H-D as fundamentally unsound it is concluded that a sound version of the criterion of empirical significance is now available. The demarcation criterion, the positivists' philosopher's stone that serves to separate claims with empirical significance from claims lacking empirical significance having finally been found, it is argued that we should regard empirical significance as just one among a variety of virtues and not follow the positivists in taking it to be a sin qua non for all meaningful statements. (shrink)

Since Christensen refuted the Bootstrap theory of confirmation in 1990, there have been some trials to improve the Hypothetico-Deductive theory of confirmation. After some trials, Gemes (1998) declared that his revised version completely overcame the difficulties of Hypothetico-Deductivism without generating any new difficulties. In this paper, I will assert that Gemes's revised version encounters some new difficulties, so it cannot be a true alternative to the Bootstrap theory of confirmation and to classical Hypothetico-Deductivism. Also I will assert that, in principle, (...) such new difficulties cannot be overcome by any trials dependent only on formal logic. (shrink)

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This paper develops a semantical model - theoretic account of (logical) content complementing the syntactically specified account of content developed in "A New Theory of Content I", JPL 23: 596-620, 1994. Proofs of Completeness are given for both propositional and quantificational languages (without identity). Means for handling a quantificational language with identity are also explored. Finally, this new notion of content is compared, in respect of both logical properties and philosophical applications, to alternative partitions of the standard consequence class relation (...) proposed by Stelzner, Schurz and Wiengartner. (shrink)

In Gemes (1990) I examined certain formal versions of hypothetico-deductivism (H-D) showing that they have the unacceptable consequence that "Abe is a white raven" confirms "All ravens are black"! In Gemes (1992) I developed a new notion of content that could save H-D from this bizarre consequence. In this paper, I argue that more traditional formulations of H-D also need recourse to this new notion of content. I present a new account of the vexing notion of the natural axiomatization of (...) a theory. The notion is used to construct a form of H-D that allows for the type of selective confirmation without which Glymour (1980a,b) claims H-D is hopeless. (shrink)

The following is an essay on the notion of scientific explanation as unification. In it a new notion of content is used to explicate Michael Friedman's notion of "k-atomicity," and to explicate the notion of the surplus content of hypothesis h relative to evidence e. From this basis an analysis of unification as theoretical reduction is advanced. A second notion of unification, unification as reconciling prima facie incompatible statements, is introduced again with the aid of this new notion of content. (...) More generally, it is argued that rather than seek the essence of scientific explanation we should carefully catalog the various distinct explanatory virtues. Finally it is argue that in particular philosophical explanations put a high premium on the quality of unification through showing how to make compatible seemingly irreconcilable claims. (shrink)

Philosophers of science as divergent as the inductivist Carnap and the deductivist Popper share the notion that the (logical) content of a proposition is given by its consequence class. I claim that this notion of content is (a) unintuitive and (b) inappropriate for many of the formal needs of philosophers of science. The basic problem is that given this notion of content, for any arbitrary p and q, [(p ∨ q)] will count as part of the content of both p (...) and q. In other words, any arbitrary p and q share some common content. This notion of content has disastrous effects on, for instance, Carnap's attempts to explicate the notion of confirmation in terms of probabilistic favorable relevance, and Popper's attempts to define verisimilitude. After briefly reviewing some of the problems of the traditional notion of content I present an alternative notion of (basic) content which (a) better fits our intuitions about content and (b) better serves the formal needs of philosophers of science. (shrink)