Ampliative Inference, Abduction, and Philosophical Dialectics A Note on Robbins' Defense of Popper Against Salmon

In the first number of this journal J.C. Robbins has given a spirited defense of Popper's deductivism against Salmon's charge that it contains surreptitious inductive elements. Popper himself is willing to allow his opponents to call the conjectures-and-refutations method “inductivism” if they mean by it exactly what he means by corroboration. Popper does not wish to quibble about a word. On the other hand I believe Salmon, with his general concept of “ampliative inference,” which includes not merely simple induction, but also Kant's synthetic a priori (as a purported “necessary truth preserving ampliative inference") and Popper's “corroboration,” has stretched the concept of “induction” beyond its original extension, and beyond the intentions of the empiricists who originally used the term

A priori and a posteriori · Dialectic · Empiricism · Epistemology · Extension (predicate logic · Inductive reasoning · Inference · Programming language · Simple (philosophy · Sociology · Wish · Computer Science · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science