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Corrigibility and Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Jack Kaminsky
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Extract

Corrigibility has generally been designated as the major qualification of a scientific law. Although various other characteristics of a scientific law have been questioned, corrigibility has usually been accepted as one of its essential features. On this basis scientists, positivists, and pragmatists have frequently distinguished between genuine empirical laws and all other assertions that only seem to be laws. The mark of a genuine law in the scientific sense is its corrigibility; the mark of a pseudo law is its non-corrigibility. In this paper I should like to reopen philosophic inquiry into the nature of corrigibility as it is supposedly exemplified in law and to call attention to some of the peculiar difficulties and conclusions attendant on any such inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 1954 , pp. 9 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1954

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References

1 Note that for purposes of this paper the term “sentence” is to be identified with the term “statement.” But for a possible difference between the two see Richard Wollheim, “Hampshire's Analogy,” Mind, LXI (1952), 567–573, and G. J. Warnock, “Verification and the Use of Language,” Revue internationale de Philosophie, 17–18 (1951), p. 316.

2 The term “experience” is notoriously ambiguous. In this connection see, for example, C. G. Hempel's article, “Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning,” Revue internationale de Philosophie, No. 11 (1950), pp. 41–63. However, in some sense we differentiate between observation sentences and those which do not have empirical referents. For the general purposes of this paper this distinction is sufficient.

3 W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review. XL (1951), 20–43.

4 In my forthcoming paper, “Metaphysics and the Problem of Synonymity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

5 John Dewey, Logic, N. Y., Henry Holt & Co., 1938, pp. 124ff.