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Hypothetico-Deductivism, Content, and the Natural Axiomatization of Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Ken Gemes
Ken Gemes*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Yale University
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, Yale University, P.O. Box 3650 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 477 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1993

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Footnotes

†

Thanks are due to an unnamed referee from this journal who in commenting on a earlier submission on Glymour's Bootstrapping theory of confirmation suggested that my new notion of content could be applied to the problem of defining natural axiomatizations and hence be used to provide a reformulated version of hypothetico-deductivism. Also special thanks are due to David Christensen who corrected various faulty formulations in an earlier draft.

References

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