Abstract
Common sense dictates to us that true statements in English of an evidential relationship remain true when uttered in Italian:
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(1)
The fact that A1, A2,..., A n are green emeralds confirms the hypothesis that all emeralds are green.
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(1’)
Ilfatto che A1 , A2,.., A n sono verdie sono smeraldi conferma la ipotesi che tutti gli smeraldi sono verdi.
A version of this paper was presented by H. Smokier at the meeting of the Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association, on December 27, 1967.
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References
Nagel’s position is stated in some of his comments in Induction: Some Current Issues (ed. by Kyburg and Nagel), Middletown 1962, as well as in his contribution to the Carnap volume in the Library of Living Philosophers. Salmon’s position is stated in a number of places. We refer here to his paper, ‘Inductive Inference’, in Philosophy of Science, The Delaware Seminar II (ed. by B. Baumrin), New York 1963. Wallace’s position is stated in his article, ‘Goodman, Logic, Induction’, Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966).
That the confirmation relation can be interpreted in other ways (and therefore that the Generalized Equivalence Condition as well can be so interpreted) will become clear in a later part of this paper.
A number of authors, including Carnap and Hempel, have argued against the acceptance of this condition. As Smokier points out in a paper, ‘Conflicting Conceptions of Confirmation’, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968) such a rejection may be more appropriate for the abductive notion of confirmation than for the enumerative one. In fact, the conditions of adequacy specified above seem most appropriate for the enumerative notion of confirmation.
We are indebted in this paragraph to Nelson Goodman for suggestions and criticisms made in discussions of an earlier draft of this paper. The paragraph to some extent presupposes Goodman’s own theory of projectibility.
We are indebted to Hempel’s criticism of an earlier version of this paper on this point.
Notice, incidentally, how closely this doctrine is tied to a version of the verifiability theory of meaning. See Quine’s discussion in the latter part of ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View.
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© 1969 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Smokler, H., Rohr, M.D. (1969). Confirmation and Translation. In: Davis, J.W., Hockney, D.J., Wilson, W.K. (eds) Philosophical Logic. Synthese Library, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9614-0_14
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