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Full Idea
Goodman constructed arguments that purported to show that a satisfactory syntactic analysis of the confirmation relation can never be found. In response, philosophers of science tried to model it in probabilistic terms.
Gist of Idea
Goodman argued that the confirmation relation can never be formalised
Source
report of Nelson Goodman (Fact, Fiction and Forecast (4th ed) [1954]) by Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R - Mathematical Methods in Philosophy 4
Book Ref
'Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophical Logic', ed/tr. Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R [Bloomsbury 2014], p.19
A Reaction
I take this idea to say that Bayesianism was developed in response to the grue problem. This is an interesting light on 'grue', which never bothered me much. The point is it scuppered formal attempts to model induction.
| 18749 | Goodman argued that the confirmation relation can never be formalised [Goodman, by Horsten/Pettigrew] |
| 17646 | Goodman showed that every sound inductive argument has an unsound one of the same form [Goodman, by Putnam] |
| 14292 | Dispositions seem more ethereal than behaviour; a non-occult account of them would be nice [Goodman] |
| 4794 | We don't use laws to make predictions, we call things laws if we make predictions with them [Goodman] |
| 12394 | If the result is bad, we change the rule; if we like the rule, we reject the result [Goodman] |