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Ideas of L. Jonathan Cohen, by Text

[British, 1923 - 2006, Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford.]

1980 The Problem of Natural Laws
p.222 p.179 Natural laws result from eliminative induction, where enumerative induction gives generalisations
     Full Idea: Cohen contends that statements that express laws of nature are the products of eliminative induction, where accidentally true generalisations are the products of enumerative induction.
     From: report of L. Jonathan Cohen (The Problem of Natural Laws [1980], p.222) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §7.1
     A reaction: The idea is that enumerative induction only offers the support of positive instances, where eliminative induction involves attempts to falsify a range of hypotheses. This still bases laws on observed regularities, rather than essences or mechanisms.