A NOTE ON COMPARATIVE INDUCTIVE LOGIC

Abstract

IN ( 86 of Logical Foundations of Probability (University of Chicago Press, I950), Carnap deals with the classificatory semantical concept of confirmation, the concept of confirming evidence. There he shows that it is easy to define an adequate explicatum for this concept on the basis of a given adequate explicatum for the quantitative concept of confirmation. He proceeds to discuss the question whether an adequate explicatum can be defined directly in terms of L-concepts, without the detour through the quantitative concept. This would benefit those logicians and scientists who are sceptical with regard to the possibility of constructing an adequate quantitative inductive logic. And, indeed, Carnap succeeds in defining in the mentioned way a concept Q' (h, i, e) such that a hypothesis h is &-confirmed by a new observational result i on the basis of the old evidence e if and