Popper and Miller (1983) have presented an argument purporting to establish the impossibility of inductive probability. Here I discuss critically their characterization of a deductive part of nondeductive support, a point that has not figured centrally in previous responses.

A new semantical antinomy, the antinomy of designation, is introduced into a metalanguage M with respect to a modal object language L. Carnap's device of restricting the principle of interchangeability for L does not suffice to prevent occurrence of this new antinomy. To achieve this result it seems most natural to replace the rules of designation for L by more complicated rules. This replacement suffices to prevent occurrence of the antinomy with respect to L. Moreover, it seems likely that analogous replacement will suffice to prevent occurrence of the antinomy with respect to languages which in means of expression are richer than L.

My purpose here is to elaborate the reasons I maintain that Salmon has not been completely successful in reporting the history of work on explanation. The most important limitation of his account is that it does not emphasize the critical necessity to embrace a suitable conception of probability in the development of the theory of probabilistic explanation.

This paper investigates the adequacy of evidential relevance relations proposed by Glymour and others. These accounts incorporate, as a necessary condition, what I call the Positive Instance Condition (PIC): the evidence statement and auxiliary assumptions entail a “positive instance” of the hypothesis. I argue that any account which incorporates PIC as a necessary condition while allowing “bootstrap testing” is doomed to fail. A nonbootstrapping evidential relevance relation of similar form is proposed, and it is argued that, in addition to avoiding published counter examples, this new relation meets two general requirements which, if not met, would undermine the ability of any account that incorporates PIC to accord with our intuitions of evidential relevance.

Anyone who has worked in Science for forty years can be much surprised to realize how little he now hears about evolution, compared with such former times. At present, evolution seems to be accepted as an axiomatic or universal principle, while the mechanism of it is not much considered, except by a small group of specialists, who work on the subject in greatly limited ways. This is practically a reversal of the former emphasis. The chemist would probably suggest that the change is due to a better realization of the chemical difficulties involved in the mechanics of evolution, and his own change in viewpoint. The chemical difficulties will have increased to an almost incredible degree in this period, and his viewpoint will have changed correspondingly. A glance at some of these changes should illuminate the progress made in both subjects in this period.

To this date Roger Bacon remains one of the controversial and colorful figures in the history of empirical science. This paper is an attempt to ascertain his views regarding the nature and function of empirical science and to compare his writings on this topic with those of the more famous Francis Bacon. The ground for comparison is the fact that both men have often been cast in the same role in the history of science; i.e., they have both been acclaimed as the first in the western world to emphasize and bring out the importance of experimental method in the accumulation of knowledge. In this connection Francis, of the sixteenth century, has long been acknowledged as the father of the experimental method in preference to Roger, of the thirteenth century. In effect, therefore, this paper probes the relative merits of the claims for each thinker.

The naive misunderstanding among economists of the relationship between economics and philosophy is as profound as it is prevalent. To be sure, economists have concerned themselves with the philosophy of economics only so much as to familiarize themselves with methodology and its application to economic inquiry. Since economics is the oldest and perhaps the most “respectable” of the social sciences its scholars have developed a phobia for anything they might suspect to be even remotely unscientific. Consequently, they have erroneously narrowed their understanding of the nature of economics. This narrowness prevails largely because most economists possess little or no training in general philosophy and especially in the philosophy of science. As a result of this apparent deficiency there exists in the minds of these economists confusion and inability to distinguish between teleology, axiology, and ethics as they do or do not apply to economics.