Abstract
In the second volume of the Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science at London in 1965, Imre Lakatos has an extremely interesting historical critique of the dispute we have been analyzing since Chapter II.1 Anyone reading his essay and this book will notice almost immediately that there are significant differences between our two accounts of the main problems and their solutions. In this chapter I shall consider three main points of contention and a few ancillary issues. First it is shown that there is a difference in the aims of logicians like Carnap and methodologists like Popper, and that Lakatos’s view of the nature of the “appraisal” problem presumably attacked by Carnap and Popper is hopelessly ambiguous. In section three I begin by disclosing an ambiguity in Lakatos’s view of the nature of the “growth” problem and then show that, contrary to Lakatos’s claims, a Carnapian logic of discovery is not “atheoretical” or “acritical”. Finally, it is shown that analytic sentences may very well function as guides of life, as both Carnap and Popper have asserted.
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Notes
Harold Jeffreys, Theory of Probability (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 1.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 24.
A. J. Ayer, “The conception of probability as a logical relation,” Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics, ed. S. Korner (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957), p. 17.
W. C. Salmon, “The justification of inductive rules of inference,” The Problem of Inductive Logic, ed. I. Lakatos (Amsterdam: North Holland Pub. Co., 1968), p. 40.
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© 1971 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Michalos, A.C. (1971). Lakatos on Appraisal, Growth and Analytic Guides. In: The Popper-Carnap Controversy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3048-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3048-9_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-247-5127-3
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