Abstract
The thesis of this paper is that extensional language alone provides an essentially inadequate foundation for the logical formalization of any lawlike statement. The arguments presented are intended to demonstrate that lawlike sentences are logically general dispositional statements requiring an essentially intensional reduction sentence formulation. By introducing a non-extensional logical operator, the ‘fork’, the difference between universal and statistical laws emerges in a distinction between dispositional predicates of universal strength as opposed to those of merely statistical strength. While the logical form of universal and statistical laws appears to be fundamentally dissimilar on the standard account, from this point of view their syntactical structure is basically the same.
This essay is dedicated to Linda M. Sartorelli. The author is indebted as well to Donald Nute of the University of Georgia for suggestive criticism.
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Notes
The sentences resulting from the instantiation of extensional sentential schemata, in other words, are eternal rather than occasion sentences in the sense of W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, 1960), pp. 191-195.
W. V. O. Quine, Mathematical Logic (Harper and Row, New York, 1951), p. 11.
Not every named thing, as Pap appears to think; cf. Arthur Pap, ‘Reduction Sentences and Disposition Concepts’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (Open Court, La Salle, III, 1963), pp. 593-597; and see also Carnap’s reply, pp. 948-949.
Quine, Mathematical Logic, p. 29.
Cf. Henry Kyburg, Philosophy of Science: A Formal Approach (The Macmillan Company, New York, 1968), pp. 313-317.
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Harper and Row, New York, 1960), p. 433. Popper’s formulation has been subjected to criticism by G. C. Nerlich and W. A. Suchting, ‘Popper on Law and Natural Necessity’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 (1967), pp. 233-35. This critique plus Popper’s rejoinder and many other related papers are published together in Tom Beauchamp, ed., Philosophical Problems of Causation (Dickenson Publishing Company, Belmont, Calif., 1974). With respect to the present explication, Popper’s formulation is ambiguous unless it is specified that all permanent and transient dispositional properties of things are kept constant, i.e., they remain permanent and transient properties of things of just the same kinds.
Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, p. 41.
Ibid. The latter includes a discussion of the relevant principles of relevance.
All lawlike conditionals that are true are maximally specific as follows: if a nomically relevant predicate is added to the reference class description (i.e., to the description of K, relative to η or of K-T, relative to 0), then either the resulting statement is a logical truth (by virtue of the fact that its antecedent condition is now self-contradictory) or it is logically equivalent to the original statement (since the additional relevant predicate is actually redundant). Cf. Carl G. Hempel,’ Maximal Specificity and Lawlikeness in Probabilistic Explanation’, Philosophy of Science (June, 1968), p. 131.
Pap mistakenly believes that ‘the distinctive property of causal implication as compared with material implication is just that the falsity of the antecedent is no ground for inferring the truth of the causal implication’; see Arthur Pap,’ Disposition Concepts and Extensional Logic’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II, H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (eds.), (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1958), p. 212. Davidson purports to demonstrate that the causal connective cannot be a conditional of any kind, essentially on the basis of his observation that, ‘My tickling Jones would cause him to laugh, but his not laughing would not cause it to be the case that I didn’t tickle him’; ‘Causal Relations’, Journal of Philosophy (November 9, 1967), pp. 691-695.
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Fetzer, J.H. (1976). The Likeness of Lawlikeness. In: Cohen, R.S., Hooker, C.A., Michalos, A.C., Van Evra, J.W. (eds) PSA 1974. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 32. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1449-6_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1449-6_19
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