PHL246H1 Study Guide - Nelson Goodman
Document Summary
The new riddle of induction by nelson goodman. Confirmation depends on more than just syntactical form. The above implies that semantics matter when confirmation is at issue. Only law-like statements can receive confirmation from instances (metal conducts electricity, e. g. ); accidental statements are not. So the riddle kind of looks like this: up until time t, all fs have been gs, but now a new predicate is introduced, so all fs are now hs. Suppose that h has the properties of g as well. Suppose that all emeralds examined before t are green. Up until t, every instance confirms the hypothesis that all emeralds are green. Now imagine the predicate grue", which covers all things covered before t just in case they are green but also other things that happen to be blue (or if you want, black ravens with exactly 42 feathers) Then at t we will have statements saying that things are green, but also grue.
