Instead, we will give an account of a few aspects of his major contributions in just sufficient detail to make their general import intelligible and to show something of their interconnections.
Our order of presentation of topics is quite independent of their chronology in Goodman's philosophical development. We begin with those of his important studies with which there appears to be widest familiarity.
Inductive Theory
One of Goodman's characterizations of the task of inductive theory is that it consists in "formulating rules that define the difference between valid and invalid inductive inferences." On this usage a set of rules for discriminating valid acceptances or nonacceptances of hypotheses from those which are invalid constitutes an inductive theory, or, alternatively, a theory of confirmation or a theory of projection.
Goodman's contribution to the provision of such inductive canons has been threefold. First, he provided an analysis of the character of philosophical problems about induction. Second, he furnished a critique of the problems still to be solved and of the versions of confirmation theory which have been at all fully elaborated (notably those of Rudolf Carnap and Carl Gustav Hempel; see Fact, Fiction and Forecast, especially pp.
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