Melanie Janine Brown (born 29 May ; known as Melanie B and Mel B) is an English singer and television blogger.com rose to fame in the s as a member of the girl group Spice Girls, in which she was nicknamed Scary blogger.com over million records sold worldwide, the group became the best-selling female group of all time. During the Spice Girls hiatus, Mel B released her debut solo The Pequot War was an armed conflict that took place between and in New England between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes. The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequot. At the end, about Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity Sep 10, · While explanation, prediction, and postdiction are alike in their logical structure, they differ in certain other respects. For example, an argument [like Figure 3 above] will qualify as a prediction only if [its explanandum] refers to an occurrence at a time later than that at which the argument is offered; in the case of postdiction, the event must occur before the presentation of the argument
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Carl G. A master of philosophical methodology, Hempel pursued explications of initially vague and ambiguous concepts, which were required to satisfy very specific criteria of adequacy. His studies of induction, explanation, and rationality in science exerted a profound influence upon more than a generation of philosophers of science, many of whom became leaders of the discipline in their own right.
He studied philosophy, physics and mathematics at the Universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg before coming to the University of Berlin inwhere a g gardiner essays studied with Hans Reichenbach. Impressed by the work of David Hilbert and Paul Bernays on the foundations of mathematics and introduced to the studies of Rudolf Carnap by Reichenbach, Hempel came to believe that the application of symbolic logic held the key to resolving a broad range of problems in philosophy, including that of separating genuine problems from merely apparent ones.
It would fall to Hempel to become perhaps the most astute critic of that movement and to contribute to its a g gardiner essays as logical empiricism. Hempel would also visit the United States twice—the University of Chicago in —38 and then the City College of New York in —40, where he held his first academic position—and eventually became a naturalized citizen.
Hempel moved to Princeton inwhere his research program flourished a g gardiner essays his influence upon professional philosophers a g gardiner essays immense. His introductory text, Philosophy of Natural Science awould be translated into ten languages.
After his death innew collections of his papers appeared Jeffrey ; Fetzerwhich complemented studies of his research Rescher ; Esler et al. However surprising it may initially seem, contemporary developments in the philosophy of science can only be properly appreciated in relation to the historical background of logical positivism.
Hempel himself attained a certain degree of prominence as a critic of this movement. Language, Truth and Logic ; 2 nd edition,authored by A. A fundamental desideratum motivating its members was to establish standards for separating genuine questions for which answers might be found from pseudo questions for which no a g gardiner essays could be found.
And sentences are synthetic when they make claims about the world. According to logical positivism, all such claims about the world have to be evaluated on the basis of experience, which means the kind of knowledge they display is a posteriori. But kinds of knowledge whose truth can be established independently of experience are a priori. Figure 1 thus reflects the intersection of kinds of sentences and kinds of knowledge on the Empiricist approach:. The category for sentences that are analytic and yet represent a posteriori knowledge deserves discussion.
The empirical study of the use of language within language-using communities by field linguists involves establishing the grammar and the vocabulary employed within each such community.
Mathematics thus becomes an exemplar of analytic a priori knowledge. Two subtheses should be distinguished: i that all mathematical concept s can be defined by means of basic logical concepts; and ii that all mathematical theorems can be deduced from basic logical truths. In order to distinguish logicism from formalism, however, the former maintains that there is one system of logic that is fundamental to all inquirieswhere all mathematical terms are reducible to logical terms, and all mathematical axioms are derivable from logical ones, which formalism denies Rech The tenability of logicism has been disputed on multiple grounds, the most prominent of which is that the notion of membership fundamental to the theory of sets is not a logical notion but rather a symbol that must be added to first-order logic to formalize what is properly understood as a non-logical theory.
Nor would philosophers today accept the conception of the axioms of set theory as logical axioms, since there exist alternatives. By this standard, sentences that are non-analytic but also non-verifiable, including various theological or metaphysical assertions concerning God or The Absolute, qualify as cognitively meaningless. This a g gardiner essays viewed as a desirable result, a g gardiner essays.
But, as Hempel would demonstrate, its scope was far too sweeping, since it also rendered meaningless the distinctively scientific assertions made by laws and theories. From an historical perspective, logical positivism represents a linguistic version of the empiricist epistemology of David Hume — His condition that significant ideas are those which can be traced back to impressions in experience that gave rise to them now became the claim that synthetic sentences have to be justified by derivability from finite classes of observation sentences.
Hume applied this criterion to exclude the idea of necessary connectionswhich are not observable, from significant causal claims, which were thereby reduced to relations of regular association, spatial contiguity, and temporal succession. Empiricism historically stands in opposition to Rationalism, which is represented most prominently by Immanuel Kant, who argued that the mind, in processing experiences, a g gardiner essays, imposes certain properties on whatever we experience, including what he called Forms of Intuition and Categories of Understanding.
The Forms of Intuition impose Euclidean spatial relations and Newtonian temporal relations; the Categories of Understanding require objects to be interpreted as substances and causes as inherently deterministic. Newer versions are associated with Noam Chomsky and with Jerry Fodor, who have championed the ideas of an innate syntax and innate semantics, respectively Chomsky ; Fodor ; Chomsky Indeed, according to the computational theory of the mind, human minds, like computing machines, are special kinds of formal systems.
Since deviations from formal systems of language in practice can be considerable, Chomsky introduced a distinction between competence and performancewhere the former models the formal system and various explanations are advanced for deviations from that model in practice, similar to differences between the fall of bodies in a vacuum and in air, which raises questions about testability that parallel those for scientific theories, in general.
If syntax is an emergent property of semantic complexity, for example, then grammar is not innate; and if mentality has and continues to evolve, Chomsky and Fodor are wrong Schoenemann ; A g gardiner essays In his study of formal systems for geometry Hempel bHempel discusses the existence of alternatives based upon different axioms, which differentiate Euclidean geometry from its non-Euclidean rivals.
According to Euclid, for example, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle must equal ° and, in relation to a point separate from a given line, one and only one parallel line passes through it. The alternatives advanced by Lobachevsky hyperbolic and by Riemann ellipticalhowever, which represent the surface of a sphere and of a saddle, a g gardiner essays, respectively, violate both of those conditions, albeit in different ways. Hempel emphasized that all three, as formal systems, are on a par, where the most appropriate choice to describe the geometry of space depends on the outcome of empirical studies.
As it happened, Einstein would adopt a generalized form of Riemannian geometry in his general theory of relativity. If mathematics is supposed to be reducible to logic and logic is supposed to be consistent, then how can alternative geometries be consistently reducible to logic?
A g gardiner essays one would dispute that they exist as distinct formal systems with their own axioms and primitives, but if these geometries are jointly reducible a g gardiner essays logic a g gardiner essays if logic is inconsistent, their existence suggests that, perhaps, as formalism claims, it is not the case there is one system of logic that is fundamental to all inquiries.
Quine argued that the notion of analyticity presupposes the notion of synonymy-in-use, which in turn presupposes understanding inter-substitutability-while-preserving-truth. He claimed none of the notions can be understood without the other, creating a circular relation between them.
The idea of analyticity appeared to have been deposed. The paper created a sensation and has been the most influential philosophical article of a g gardiner essays past years, a g gardiner essays. In cases of this kind, he conceded, inter-substitutability, synonymy, and analyticity are related in an unproblematic way.
It would have been odd for a logician to deny the existence of logical truths or the role of stipulations, which are basic to the construction of formal systems, which suggests that he may not have actually defeated the idea of analyticity, after all Fetzer Indeed, Carnap a g gardiner essays explained that the process of constructing a vocabulary and a grammar for a language-in-use involves several stages, including observation of the use of language by members of the community, a g gardiner essays, formulating hypotheses regarding the meaning of its phrases and expressions, and drawing inferences about the underlying grammar.
These are pragmatic, semantic, and syntactical procedures, respectively, and decisions have to be made in arriving at a theory about the language as the outcome of empirical research. The construction of formal systems thus provides an illustration of the elements of artificial languages, where accounts of natural language counterparts can be subject to further testing and refinement. Moreover, in Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical ScienceHempel had endorsed explication as a method of definition analogous to theory construction by taking words and phrases that are somewhat vague and ambiguous and subjecting them to a process of clarification and disambiguation.
Adequate explications are required to satisfy criteria of syntactical determinacy, a g gardiner essays, semantic relevance, and pragmatic benefit by clarifying and illuminating the meaning of those words and phrases in specific contexts.
which means that anything not subject to the test, such as a brown cow, is magnetic. This solved one problem by abandoning the goal of defining the predicate for a partial specification of meaning. But this no longer has the character of even a partial definition but instead that of an empirical law. The prospect that analytic sentences might have synthetic consequences was not a welcome result Hempel Carnap was receptive to the adoption of an intensional methodology that went beyond the constraints of extensional logic, which Hempel b would consider but leave for others to pursue Fetzer The distinction can be elaborated with respect to the difference between the actual world and alternative possible worlds as sequences of events that diverge from those that define the history of the actual world.
If specific conditions that obtained at a specific time had been different, for example, the course of ensuing events would have changed. There appear a g gardiner essays be two broad kinds of justification for subjunctive conditionals, which are logical and ontological, where logical justifications are derived from the grammar and vocabulary of a specific language, such as English.
The approach appeals to necessary connections, which are unobservable and therefore unacceptable to Hume. In the s and 60s, however, Nelson Goodman and Karl Popper were attempting to sort out the linkage between dispositions, subjunctives, and laws from distinctive points of view. Within logical positivism, observation language was assumed to consist of names and predicates whose applicability or not can be ascertained, under suitable conditions, by means of direct observation such as using names and predicates for colors, shapes, sounds or relatively simple measurement names and predicates for heights, weights, and sizes, for example.
This was an epistemic position, of course, since it was sorting them out based upon their accessibility by means of experience. Both theoretical and dispositional predicates, which refer to non-observables, a g gardiner essays, posed serious problems for the positivist position, since the verifiability criterion implies they must be reducible to observables or are empirically meaningless. Karl Popper, however, would carry the argument in a different direction by looking at the ontic nature of properties.
Popper has emphasized that we are theorizing all the time. Consider the observation of a glass full of clear liquid. Then it quenches thirst and extinguishes fires and nourishes plants. Consider the differences between basket balls, billiard balls, and tennis balls. Things of different kinds can do different things. Even the seemingly simplest observation of a rabbit in the backyard, for example, a g gardiner essays, implies that it is going to display rabbit-like behavior, including eating carrots when my wife puts them out, a g gardiner essays.
It is going to hop around and create more rabbits. It will not turn out to be stuffed. And this suggested that observational properties and predicates are dispositional, too. From the Humean epistemic perspective, observational, dispositional, and theoretical predicates are successively more and more problematical in relation to their accessibility via experience. The observational describe observable properties of observable entities; the dispositionalunobservable properties of observable entities; and the theoreticalunobservable properties of unobservable entities.
Popper suggested that observational and theoretical properties gravitational strengths electromagnet fields, a g gardiner essays, and such are ontologically dispositional, too Popper But if universals as properties that can be attributed to any member of any possible world are dispositions and the kind of property dispositions are does not depend upon the ease with which their presence or absence can be ascertained, then nomological subjunctives and counterfactuals—taken as instantiations of lawlike generalizations for specific individuals, a g gardiner essays, places, and times—might be explicable as displays of dispositions and of natural necessities Fetzer Hempel, meanwhile, demonstrated that the verifiability criterion could not be sustained.
Since it restricts empirical knowledge to observation sentences and their deductive consequences, a g gardiner essays, scientific theories are reduced to logical constructions from observables. In a series of studies about cognitive significance and empirical testability, he demonstrated that the verifiability criterion implies that existential generalizations are meaningful, but that universal generalizations are not, even though they include general laws, the principal objects of scientific discovery.
Hypotheses about relative frequencies in finite sequences are meaningful, but hypotheses concerning limits in infinite sequences are not. The verifiability criterion thus imposed a standard that was too strong to accommodate the characteristic claims of science and was not justifiable.
Assertions about God or The Absolute were meaningless by this criterion, since they are not observation statements or deducible from them. They concern entities that are non-observable. That was a desirable result.
But by a g gardiner essays same standard, claims that were made by a g gardiner essays laws and theories were also meaningless. Indeed, scientific theories affirming the existence of gravitational attractions and of electromagnetic fields were thus rendered comparable to beliefs about transcendent entities such as an omnipotent, omniscient, a g gardiner essays omni-benevolent God, for example, because no finite sets of observation sentences are sufficient to deduce the a g gardiner essays of entities of those kinds.
These considerations suggested that the logical relationship between scientific theories and empirical evidence cannot be exhausted by means of observation sentences and their deductive consequences alone, but needs to include observation sentences and their inductive consequences as well Hempel At least two of its defining tenets had been shown to be without merit. There he proposed that cognitive significance could not be adequately captured by means of principles of verification or falsification, whose defects were parallel, but instead required a far more subtle and nuanced approach.
Hempel suggested multiple criteria for assessing the cognitive significance of different theoretical systems, where significance is not categorical but rather a matter of degree:. Precisely what remained, however, was in doubt.
Perhaps this study came the closest to defining its intellectual core. He also considered sentences of more complex logical structures, but nothing hinges upon their use that cannot be addressed relative to an example of the simplest possible kind.
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, time: 8:55Pequot War - Wikipedia
Melanie Janine Brown (born 29 May ; known as Melanie B and Mel B) is an English singer and television blogger.com rose to fame in the s as a member of the girl group Spice Girls, in which she was nicknamed Scary blogger.com over million records sold worldwide, the group became the best-selling female group of all time. During the Spice Girls hiatus, Mel B released her debut solo The Pequot War was an armed conflict that took place between and in New England between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes. The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequot. At the end, about Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity Sep 10, · While explanation, prediction, and postdiction are alike in their logical structure, they differ in certain other respects. For example, an argument [like Figure 3 above] will qualify as a prediction only if [its explanandum] refers to an occurrence at a time later than that at which the argument is offered; in the case of postdiction, the event must occur before the presentation of the argument
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