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Earman on the Projectibility of Grue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Marc Lange
Marc Lange*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

In Bayes or Bust?, John Earman (1992, 104-113) attempts to express in Bayesian terms a sense of “projectibility” in which it is logically impossible for “All emeralds are green” and “All emeralds are grue” simultaneously to be projectible. I argue that Earman overlooks an important sense in which these two hypotheses cannot both be projectible. This sense is important because it connects projectibility to lawlikeness, as Goodman intended. Whether this suggests a solution to Goodman's riddle remains unsettled, awaiting an account of lawlikeness. I explore one avenue that might prove illuminating.

Suppose we discover that object a is G, where our background beliefs K include that Ea. Earman notes that by Bayes's theorem, hypothesis H (“All E's are G”) is confirmed—i.e., .

Type
Part II. Explanation, Induction, and Linguistic Representation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 87 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

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