On a claim by Skyrms concerning lawlikeness and confirmation

Philosophy of Science 35 (3):274-278 (1968)
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Abstract

In his article [5], Brian Skyrms adduces some generalizations which, he claims, receive no confirmatory support from their positive instances even though all the predicates they contain are well entrenched in Goodman's sense. Invoking the principle that “a generalization is lawlike if it is capable of receiving confirmatory support from its positive instances”, he claims that his examples “provide striking demonstration of the fact that the lawlikeness of a hypothesis is not a simple function of the projectibility of its constituent predicates.” I think the claim is of great interest; but I will try to show that Skyrms's argument fails to establish it because it presupposes an unwarranted assumption which raises a problem of general importance for confirmation theory.

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References found in this work

A purely syntactical definition of confirmation.Carl G. Hempel - 1943 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 8 (4):122-143.
The Logical Foundations of Probability. [REVIEW]Rudolf Carnap - 1950 - Journal of Philosophy 60 (13):362-364.
Nomological necessity and the paradoxes of confirmation.Brian Skyrms - 1966 - Philosophy of Science 33 (3):230-249.

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