Faulty Formalization Nelson Goodman The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 60, No. 20. (Sep. 26, 1963), pp. 578-579. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%2819630926%2960%3A20%3C578%3AFF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc..
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578
T H E JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
I t has been my contention that some philosophical problems are deeper than grammatical slips or jokes ; their roots reach into men's awareness (how fruitfully or how fruitlessly we have yet to determine) of the plainly observable facts of human existence. I t is time to start asking ourselves: what relationships do these facts have with those problems? And in answering this question we may find that the distinction between sense and nonsense and between fact and grammar (two different but related distinctions) are not always abysses, but are sometimes bridges, and possibly even good bridges.
PHILIPP. HALLIE CENTERFOR ADVANCED STUDIES, WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
COMMENTS AND CRITICISM FAULTY FORMALIZATION
P
ROFESSOR R. M. Martin, in an appendix to his Toward a Systematic Pragmatic,' has tried to formalize the treatment of projectibility in my Fact, Fiction, and F ~ r e c a s t . ~He quotes (page 96) from my text (page 90): "A hypothesis will be said to be actually projected when it is adopted after some of its instances have been examined and determined to be true, and before the rest have been examined." He then writes: "To say that a sentence a 'is examined and determined t o be true' a t time t we take to mean merely that a is accepted a t t. (No reference to the semantical truth-concept here seems needed. Nor do we need a separate primitive for 'examined')." Actually this policy makes nonsense of his formalization. His definition of 'actually projected', if we somewhat simplify the temporal clauses to stress the main point, amounts to this: A hypothesis "(x)(Px)" is actually projected when it is accepted while some instance "Pb" is accepted and some other instance is not accepted. Looking back to Martin's treatment of 'accept', we find (page 44, TC9) that every sentence that is not accepted is rejected (in one of two senses of rejection that he defines). Thus actual projection would require accepting a hypothesis while accepting some of its instances and rejecting others. Obviously, projection as I have described it has nothing t o do with such inconsistent behavior. 1 2
Amsterdam, 1959.
Cambridge, Mass., 1955.
COMMENTS A N D CRITICISM
There is further trouble. A hypothesis is actually projected only when it has some positive instances, no negative instances, and some undetermined instances. Martin defines an instance as positive if it is accepted, negative if its negate is accepted, and undetermined if it is neither positive nor negative. Since a statement not accepted is for him rejected, using these definitions will give the following remarkable result: A hypothesis is actually projected only when it and some of its instances are accepted, the negates of none of its instances are accepted, and some instance and its negate are both rejected. The specific anomalies so far pointed out could be corrected by allowing for a class of statements that are neither accepted nor rejected. But the root of the trouble lies much deeper. Projection does not consist of accepting a hypothesis while accepting some but not others of its instances. Projection consists rather of accepting a hypothesis and therefore presumably all its instances when only some of these have been examined and all so examined have been determined to be true. Projection is not less-than-complete acceptance but acceptance on the basis of less-than-complete evidence. I n dealing with projection, some such notions as 'examine' and 'determine to be true' are needed along with 'accept'.
T I M E REVERSAL, INFORMATION THEORY, AND "W O R L D 4 E O M E T R Y ' '
J. J. C. Smart's note, "Is Time Travel Possible?'" commenting on Hilary Putnam's model of thermodynamic reversibility, prompts me to make some further comments. There are a t least three questions about Oscar Smith's "time travel" we must attempt to answer: (1) Is a time with "reversed entropy" conceptually admissible at all and if so in what context? (2) Can Oscar Smith i n the "Putnam reversed-entropy" apparatus ''communicate information" to somebody who is living in the ordinary entropic time 7 ( 3 ) Do relativistic and quantum-theoretical (e.g., Feynman-Stiickelberg) models, in which the time coordinate can take on decreasing instead of increasing values, carry unsuspected metaphysical implications ? 1. Much recent literature on thermodynamics, communication theory, and information theory leaves the reader with the impres* This JOURNAL,60, 9 (Apr. 25, 1963) : 237-241.
