Inductive Knowledge. In Lehrer, K., Marek, J.Ch. (Eds). Austrian Philosophy Past and Present, Essays in Honor of Rudolf Haller, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1996, pp. 221-235., 1996
Starting from Humes problem, several strategies to counter it are discussed, with the result that... more Starting from Humes problem, several strategies to counter it are discussed, with the result that only a non-probabilistic version of 'Good Old-fashioned Induction' remains as a viable option.
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Papers by Alfred Schramm
Section 1 prepares some ground for the argument. As much of it depends on the notion of evidential significance, this concept is defined and its introduction motivated. Further, I introduce and explain the distinction between support and confirmation: put in a slogan, ‘confirmation is support by significant evidence’.
Section 2 deals with the Riddle itself. It is shown that, given the provisions of section 1, it is not the case that ‘anything confirms anything’ (as maintained by Goodman): significant green-evidence confirms only green-hypotheses (and no grue-hypotheses), and significant grue-evidence confirms only grue-hypotheses (and no green-hypotheses), whichever terms we use (whether 'Green/Blue' or 'Grue/Bleen' terminology) for expressing these evidences or hypotheses.
Section 3 rounds off my treatment. First I show that Frank Jackson’s use of his counterfactual condition is unsuccessful. Further, I argue that no unwanted consequences result, if one starts from the other, ‘objective’, definition of ‘grue’: it is no more than a mere fact of logic that cannot do any harm. Finally, I present a grue-case involving both kinds of definition, where the exclusive confirmation of either the green- or the grue-hypothesis is shown.
imbedded in a comprehensive web of thought and observations of language use and
development, communication, and social interaction, all these as empirical phenomena.
Rather than for a theory, I take it for a ‘‘model’’ of the kind which gives us
guidance in how to organize linguistic and language-related phenomena. My
comments on it are restricted to three aspects: In 2 I deal with the question of how
Lehrerian sense can be empirically distinguished from Lehrerian reference as a
precondition for the claim that sense relationships are in general more stable than
reference relations. It seems that this very claim must already be presupposed for
doing the respective empirical investigation. But in 3, I argue for the option to
interpret the Lehrers’ concept of sense resp. sense vectors as intension concepts, by
which move one may gain a generalized concept, so-to-say ‘‘graded analyticity’’,
containing Carnapian strict analyticity for language systems as the extreme case of
sense vectors with maximum value. Such graded sense may also be empirically
investigated in the case of normal languages. In 4, I plead for my view that what the
Lehrers take for communal languages are really collections of family-resembling
idiolects of individual speakers and hypotheses of individual speakers about the
idiolects of their fellow speakers. This move should free us from the fiction of, and
sterile discussions about, the ‘‘true’’ meanings of words, but nevertheless keep
normal language communication possible. As a concluding remark I propose in 5 to
have both: normal languages from an empirical point of view, and codified languages
from a logical reconstructionist one.
Section 1 prepares some ground for the argument. As much of it depends on the notion of evidential significance, this concept is defined and its introduction motivated. Further, I introduce and explain the distinction between support and confirmation: put in a slogan, ‘confirmation is support by significant evidence’.
Section 2 deals with the Riddle itself. It is shown that, given the provisions of section 1, it is not the case that ‘anything confirms anything’ (as maintained by Goodman): significant green-evidence confirms only green-hypotheses (and no grue-hypotheses), and significant grue-evidence confirms only grue-hypotheses (and no green-hypotheses), whichever terms we use (whether 'Green/Blue' or 'Grue/Bleen' terminology) for expressing these evidences or hypotheses.
Section 3 rounds off my treatment. First I show that Frank Jackson’s use of his counterfactual condition is unsuccessful. Further, I argue that no unwanted consequences result, if one starts from the other, ‘objective’, definition of ‘grue’: it is no more than a mere fact of logic that cannot do any harm. Finally, I present a grue-case involving both kinds of definition, where the exclusive confirmation of either the green- or the grue-hypothesis is shown.
imbedded in a comprehensive web of thought and observations of language use and
development, communication, and social interaction, all these as empirical phenomena.
Rather than for a theory, I take it for a ‘‘model’’ of the kind which gives us
guidance in how to organize linguistic and language-related phenomena. My
comments on it are restricted to three aspects: In 2 I deal with the question of how
Lehrerian sense can be empirically distinguished from Lehrerian reference as a
precondition for the claim that sense relationships are in general more stable than
reference relations. It seems that this very claim must already be presupposed for
doing the respective empirical investigation. But in 3, I argue for the option to
interpret the Lehrers’ concept of sense resp. sense vectors as intension concepts, by
which move one may gain a generalized concept, so-to-say ‘‘graded analyticity’’,
containing Carnapian strict analyticity for language systems as the extreme case of
sense vectors with maximum value. Such graded sense may also be empirically
investigated in the case of normal languages. In 4, I plead for my view that what the
Lehrers take for communal languages are really collections of family-resembling
idiolects of individual speakers and hypotheses of individual speakers about the
idiolects of their fellow speakers. This move should free us from the fiction of, and
sterile discussions about, the ‘‘true’’ meanings of words, but nevertheless keep
normal language communication possible. As a concluding remark I propose in 5 to
have both: normal languages from an empirical point of view, and codified languages
from a logical reconstructionist one.