Wesley C. Salmon

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Wesley C. Salmon (born August 9, 1925 - April 22, 2001 ) was an American philosopher and science theorist , known for his work on models of scientific explanation . In the field of confirmation theory, Salmon analyzed how hypotheses are developed and confirmed on the basis of probability theory and inductive logic . He was married to the scientific theorist Marilee H. Salmon .

Salmon has taught at Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Pittsburgh . He obtained his PhD in philosophy under Hans Reichenbach . He died in April 2001 as a result of a car accident.

Salmon made particular contributions to a realistic understanding of causality in scientific contexts of explanation and justification, also or because this realism has met with numerous criticisms. His books on the structure of scientific explanation are considered to be groundbreaking for the philosophy of science of the 20th century, and led to the recognition of the roles of causality for scientific explanatory models, even if the nature of causality itself remains in the dark.

Under the influence of logical empiricism , especially through Carl Hempel's deductive-nomological model , the view was established that scientific explanations determine regularities and patterns instead of determining causes . Salmon replaced the inductive-statistical understanding of the scientific explanation with a model for statistical relevance, and added a criterion of strict maximum specificity to the deductive-nomological model. But in the end Salmon insisted that statistical models and legal regularity can only be preliminary stages and insufficient stages of scientific explanation. According to Salmon, a causal mechanic should be the standard for a sophisticated scientific explanation.

Education and career

Salmon attended Wayne State University in Michigan and earned a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1947 . Salmon received his PhD in philosophy from UCLA in 1950 under Hans Reichenbach . He was a faculty member at Brown University from 1995 and 1963 , then served on the Faculty of Science Theory and History of Indiana University Bloomington and received the Norwood Russell Hanson Professorship . In 1973 he moved to Arizona with his wife Merilee. He left the University of Arizona in 1981 and followed a call to the then famous Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh , where he took the chair in 1983, succeeding Carl Hempel . Salmon retired in 1999.

Salmon's publications are numerous, including over a hundred articles and posts. His introduction to logic was considered the standard textbook for decades, has been revised and reissued several times and has been translated into numerous languages. Salmon was Chairman of the Philosophy of Science Association in 1971 and 1972 , and then Chairman of the West Coast Regional Association of the American Philosophical Association in 1977 and 1978 . In 1988 he held a four-part series of lectures at the University of Bologna on the 900th anniversary of its existence, for which he had specially learned the Italian language. From 1998 to 1999 he was chairman of the UNESCO- supported International Union of History and Philosophy of Science . Salmon was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Justification Theory

Since 1983 Salmon has dealt with questions of scientific theory formation. He endeavored to overcome the conflict between the schools' view of logical empiricism and critical rationalism , according to which theories are compared according to logical criteria and empirical confirmation, and the historical perspective according to Thomas S. Kuhn , which declares different theories to be incommensurable , so that statements can only be translated and hypotheses compared between different paradigms with great difficulty. He assumed that the premise of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was largely misunderstood. Kuhn did not want to assert that the theory change was an irrational process, but that it took place in relation to the affected scientific community . Salmon came to the conviction that with the help of the Bayesian concept of probability , which enables a quantification of decision-making through subjective probability understood as "degree of belief" , the gap between this view and the programs of logical empiricism could be bridged.

Scientific explanation model

Empiricism à la Hume

The classical empiricist position on causality, which can be traced back to David Hume , states that causal relationships themselves are not observable, but only a constant common occurrence of certain perceptible events, and that causal relationships between these observations are therefore a mere assumption of the mind. More precisely, causality can only be experienced through the absence of counterfactual situations, in which a presumed cause is manipulated and an effect on state B is observed at the same time, without any further connection between A and B being visible, which is a logical or natural necessity would bring.

In the 20th century, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim asked why? -Ask the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation developed. In conjunction with deterministic laws, this model gives a scientific explanation a logical form, according to which a result can be deductively derived from starting conditions and universal laws ; however, causal causation in particular is not discussed here. If statistical probability rules ( ceteris paribus ) are used instead of strict laws , Hempel's inductive-statistical model emerges. This model also depicts correlations well, but omits actual causation.

Relevance and specificity

Around 1970 Salmon had come to the realization that when explaining probability phenomena, not only a high correlation is expected, but also a causal influence, in which components are methodically removed from a system to be examined, whether those that can identify the correlation influence. Salmon wanted to replace Hempel's statistical model with one with a statistical relevance model.

When Hempel and Oppenheim developed the deductive-nomological model in 1948, they had formulated semi-formal adequacy conditions for the general rule, but described the third as redundant, requiring empirical content . The other three, derivability, legal form and truth, already implied this. In the early 1980s, Salmon wanted to bring the reason back into the justification by replacing the condition of empirical content with a stronger maximum specificity . Ultimately, however, Salmon found mere modifications of the general rule in the Hempel-Oppenheim scheme insufficient.

Causal mechanism

While the mainstream of the philosophy of science treated the problems of scientific explanation as an epistemological problem, in which the counterfactual deductions of the phenomenon to be explained from an initial state and a suitable law were at the center, Salmon made references to causality everywhere in actual scientific explanations. Thus the regularity as a natural law could not only be a mere epistemic regularity, but could lead it back to structural properties of the physical world. Scientific explanations should therefore indicate how the phenomenon to be explained is embedded in the entire causal context of the world (“fits into the causal nexus”). This is at the core of Salmon's understanding of causality as a fixed mechanism. For example, Boyle-Mariotte 's gas law puts the temperature, pressure and volume of an ideal gas in a fixed, observable relationship (epistemic level), but this could later be traced back to the rules of statistical mechanics that determine the average kinetic energy of the colliding gas molecules (ontic Level). Salmon therefore came to the conclusion that a model of scientific explanation should not only be nomological in the sense of a general and necessary rule, but also ontological in the sense of causal mechanics. Yet with Salmon it remains vague how scientists should ascertain this causality. Nevertheless, causality has moved back to the center of the philosophy of science.

Feature transfer

Salmon strove for causality as a process ("process theory") that gets by without counterfactual conditionals and yet meets Hume's empirical strictness claims. He criticized Bertrand Russell's conception of causality as causal lines , which is a forerunner of modern models, for considering epistemological, but not ontic, aspects. Already Hans Reichenbach had stated that Russell's theory of causality actual cause is not "unreal sequences" ( "unreal sequences") is different. Reichenbach uses this to designate connected sequences that are not actually causally linked. Salmon's explanation of causal processes drew some criticism, to which Salmon countered that causal processes and interactions are fundamental mechanisms , with interactions being more fundamental than sequences but discussed first for practical reasons.

According to Salmons, causal processes are the “means. through which causal influences are transmitted "(" the means by which causal influence is transmitted "), and which are therefore the one that" accurately represents those objective physical causal connections that Hume sought in vain "(" constitute precisely the objective physical causal connections which Hume sought in vain ”). According to Salmon, causal processes can transfer a feature ( mark ) or a structure in a spatiotemporal context. According to Salmon, it is through such transfers that causal processes can be distinguished from Reichenbach's “unreal sequences”. Causal ramifications are therefore that "what creates and changes causal structures" ("the means by which causal structure is generated and modified"). However, critics have blamed Salmon's theory of trait transference for failing to make such a distinction.

Works (selection)

  • The Status of Prior Probabilities in Statistical Explanation . In: Philosophy of Science , Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr., 1965), pp. 137-146.
  • The Foundations of Scientific Inference (1967)
  • Logic , Englewood Cliffs, Second Edition, 1973; German edition: Logic , Reclam, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-15-007996-9
  • Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (1984)
  • Four Decades of Scientific Explanation (1990)
  • Causality Without Counterfactuals . In: Philosophy of Science , Vol. 61, No. 2 (Jun., 1994), pp. 297-312.
  • Causality and Explanation . Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • The Spirit of Logical Empiricism: Carl G. Hempel's Role in Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science . In: Philosophy of Science , Vol. 66, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), pp. 333-350.

literature

  • Adolf Grünbaum: Wesley Salmon's Intellectual Odyssey and Achievements . In: Philosophy of Science , Volume 71, No. 5, Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part II: Symposia Papers (Dec., 2004), pp. 922-925.
  • Adolf Grünbaum: Wesley C. Salmon, 1925-2001 . In: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , Vol. 75, No. 2 (Nov. 2001), pp. 125-127.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e f William Bechtel, Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell Biology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 24-25 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Lance Lugar, § "Biography", Collection # ASP.2003.01: "Wesley C. Salmon Papers" , Special Collections Department, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, 1951–2001 ( collection dates), Jun 2011 (date published), Website access March 12, 2014.
  3. ↑ Vincenzo Crupi:  Confirmation. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
  4. ↑ utimes.pitt.edu
  5. ↑ a b c d James H Fetzer: In memoriam: Wesley C Salmon (1925-2001) . In: Synthesis , 2002 Jul, 132, (1-2), pp. 1-3. doi: 10.1023 / A: 1019636429609
  6. ^ A b Adolf Grünbaum: Memorial minutes: Wesley C. Salmon, 1925-2001 . In: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association , 2001 Nov, 75, (2), pp. 125-127. JSTOR 3218727
  7. ↑ a b c d e Phil Dowe:  Causal Processes. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . , there especially §§ 2-4.
  8. ↑ Kenneth J Rothman & Sander Greenland: Causation and causal inference in epidemiology . In: American Journal of Public Health , 2005, 95 (Suppl 1), pp. 144-150, PMID 16030331 .
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g h James Woodward: Book review: Wesley Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World . In: Noûs , 1988 Jun, 22 (2), pp. 322-324, JSTOR 2215867 .
  10. ↑ a b James H Fetzer, ch 3 The paradoxes of Hempelian explanation ", in Fetzer, ed, Science, Explanation, and Rationality: Aspects of the Philosophy of Carl G Hempel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p 129 .
  11. ↑ Paul Lewis, "Wesley C. Salmon, 75, theorist in realm of improbable events" , New York Times , May 4., 2001
  12. ↑ a b Salmon's publication "Rationality and objectivity in science" ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , published posthumously in, Reality and Rationality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp pp 93–94 . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mcps.umn.edu
  13. ↑ a b Gary Goertz & Jack S Levy, ch 2 "Causal explanation, necessary conditions, and case studies", pp 9–46, in Jack Levy & Gary Goertz, eds, Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals ( New York: Routledge, 2007), p 11 .
  14. ↑ a b Wesley C Salmon, Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), pp 7-8 .
  15. ↑ James H Fetzer, ch 3, in Fetzer J, ed, Science, Explanation, and Rationality: Aspects of the Philosophy of Carl G Hempel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p 113 .
  16. ↑ James H Fetzer, ch 3 "The paradoxes of Hempelian explanation", in Fetzer J, ed, Science, Explanation, and Rationality: Aspects of the Philosophy of Carl G Hempel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp 121– 22 .
  17. ^ A b Kenneth F Schaffner: Philosophy of medicine . ch 8, pp. 310-245. In: Merrilee H Salmon (ed): Introduction to the Philosophy of Science . Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis 1992/1999, p. 338 .
  18. ^ Andrew C Ward: The role of causal criteria in causal inferences: Bradford Hill's 'aspects of association' . In: Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations , 2009 Jun 17, 6, p. 2, PMID 19534788
  19. ^ A b c d Wesley C Salmon, ch 16 "Casuality without counterfactuals", Causality and Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p 248 .
personal data
SURNAME Salmon, Wesley C.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH August 9, 1925
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 2001