Logics Appropriate To Empirical Theories

Abstract

To those like myself who are mainly concerned with the methodology of the empirical sciences, the present symposium is both sobering and encouraging. It is sobering as one thinks of the scientific contrast between the majority of papers read here and the standard sources in the methodology and philosophy of science. Yet it is encouraging, because the hope is engendered that many of the methods, and perhaps above all, the intellectual standards of these papers, will extend themselves in a natural way to logical investigations of the empirical sciences. The logical and philosophical foundations of physics, for example, seem to be at about the stage where the foundations of mathematics were during most of the nineteenth century. Nearly any physicist and a large number of philosophers are prepared to deliver at a moment’s notice a lecture on the foundations of quantum mechanics. The situation is far different with respect to the foundations of mathematics. With an ever-increasing volume of deep and rigorous results, mathematicians unacquainted with the literature are not prone to deliver casually-put-together obiter dicta on logic and related topics.