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| 13048 | Good explications are exact, fruitful, simple and similar to the explicandum |
| Full Idea: Carnap's four criteria for giving a good explication are similarity to the explicandum, exactness, fruitfulness and simplicity. | |||
| From: report of Rudolph Carnap (Logical Foundations of Probability [1950], Ch.1) by Wesley Salmon - Four Decades of Scientific Explanation 0.1 | |||
| A reaction: [compressed] Salmon's view is that this represents the old attitude, that the contribution of philosophy to explanation is the clarification of the key concepts. Carnap is, of course, a logical empiricist. |