Abstract
The seventeenth century saw the beginnings of two powerful and important ways of conceiving one proposition to support another in cases where the truth of the former is formal-logically consistent with the falsehood of the latter. Early in the century Francis Bacon urged the possibility of discovering causal uniformities from tables of presence and absence — lists of circumstances present, and circumstances absent, when the phenomenon under investigation was found. Bacon thought that natural laws which were so discovered would become more and more certain as they increased in comprehensiveness and subsumed a greater and greater variety of know uniformaities, provided that these laws also lead us to new knowledge. A little later Pascal and Fermat laid down principles for a mathemaical calculus of chance that Leibniz and Bermoulli interpreted as binding normal judgements of probability — in law courts, for example, as well as in games of chance.
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References
Letter to Couring, March 19, 1678, in Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. by C. I. Gerhardt, Vol. 1, 1875, p. 195f.
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Cf. also the rather more ad hominem argument that Goodman’s solution is intrinsically incoherent: A. Zabludowski, ‘Concerning a fiction about how facts are forecast’, Journal of Philosophy lxxi (1974), p. 97ff.
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These appeals to intuition are referenced and criticised in L. Jonathan Cohen, ‘How Empirical is Contemporary Logical Empiricism?’, Philosophia 5 (1975), pp. 299–317.
Cf. L. Jonathan Cohen, The Probable and the Provable, 1977, Sees. 1–9.
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© 1981 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Cohen, L.J. (1981). Inductive Logic 1945–1977. In: Agazzi, E. (eds) Modern Logic — A Survey. Synthese Library, vol 149. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9056-2_20
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