Friday, 8 April 2005
Analogical Reasoning in the Logical Structure of Scientific Law
Dale Jacquette, Penn State University
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: Efforts to formalize the logical structure
of scientific law encounter a dilemma. Universal generalizations
lack explanatory force if they amount to no more than accidental
generalizations, but are vacuous and thus trivially true when their
antecedents describe idealized entities that do not exist in nature.
To adjoin existence assertions to universal generalizations to avoid
vacuity where the idealizations described in laws fail to exist
makes scientific laws false. Problems about the modality of
logically contingent scientific laws that describe nomically necessary
causal connections holding between event types present another challenge
for understanding the logic of natural laws. I propose a unified
logical analysis of the structure of scientific law that attaches
nomic necessity to the consequents of logically contingent universal
generalizations and establishes an analogy between idealizations
and the existent actual states of affairs to which existential commitment
is made that approximate the ideal, together with an exact method
of calculating the degree of their approximation for the sake of
determining the limits of a law's explanatory adequacy in a modified
deductive-nomological covering-law model.
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