Nelson Goodman is not only an excellent philosopher, he's also an excellent writer. While the first chapter of this book may be difficult to slog through for those with little background in counterfactuals, the remaining three are clear, engaging, and insightful. (In fact, you can skip the first chapter and still profit immensely from the book.) Goodman begins with the classic problem of induction as outlined by Hume. He interprets Hume as having tried to solve the problem by describing the sort of induction we consider rational. He then uses this understanding as a springboard into a more complete theory of induction. While I have reservations about his interpretation of Hume, I find his approach to the problem of induction is fascinating.
Before outlining his own proposal, Goodman raises the stakes by offering a new problem of induction. Goodman shows that induction must amount to more than a commitment to the past being like the future because, by defining new predicates in terms of the ones we typically use, we can argue on the basis of previous confirmation that just about anything will be the case. This is obviously undesirable, since we want induction to affirm that all ravens are black and not affirm that all ravens are white.
Goodman's solution to this new problem is to define induction with reference not only to existing data, but also to past predictions (or more generally, projections, inductive claims about cases that have not yet been examined for confirmation). A given hypothesis or predicate becomes more "entrenched" by having been used previously in successful projections, giving the predicate or hypothesis greater legitimacy than the infinite other hypotheses that might fit the data, but which we have not previously affirmed.
OF course, for the realist who believes we have predicates that cut the world up more or less as it is, the new problem of induction is no problem at all. But even still, Goodman's book is a fascinating exploration of a way of dealing with induction and a model of philosophical writing.
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יודה
まぎれない名著です。心の哲学,人工知能,脳理論に重要な示唆を提供しています。
Reviewed in Japan on September 27, 2018
