• Corpus ID: 170834415

Fact, Fiction, and Forecast

@inproceedings{Goodman1955FactFA,
  title={Fact, Fiction, and Forecast},
  author={Nelson Goodman},
  year={1955}
}

• N. Goodman
• Published 1955
• Philosophy

liELsoN Goodman's second book,1 which represents?excepting the first chapter, a reprint of the well-known paper, "The Prob lem of Counterfactual Conditionals"?the "Special Lectures in Philosophy" he delivered at the University of London in 1953, is small in volume but rich in content. There is a clear thread run ning through its four chapters: counterf actual conditionals (which in recent years have given such headaches to several ana lytic philosophers) speak about possible non-actual 2 events. But Goodman cannot accept talk about possible events or entities in good philosophical conscience; according to his "actualist" onto logy, as we might call it, there are no possibilities, just as for a nominalist there are no classes and other abstract entities. To put it in the formal mode of speech: he wants to find a way of trans lating all modal talk into a non-modal language. Guided by this motivation, he proceeds to examine the distinction between "law like" and "accidental" statements and, after an impressive display of analytical acumen, comes to the conclusion that the solution of this problem of explication is one with the solution of the problem of induction: what is the criterion of reasonableness of an inductive inference? How are warranted predictions to be dis tinguished from unwarranted ones? There seem to me, however, to be serious flaws in Goodman's intricate chain of argument, which I wish to examine in some detail.