Wesley C. Salmon

Education and career

Salmon attended Wayne State University, then received a master's degree in 1947 from the University of Chicago. At UCLA, under Hans Reichenbach, Salmon earned a PhD in philosophy in 1950. when he joined the History and Philosophy of Science Department of Indiana University Bloomington where Norwood Russell Hanson was Professor until he and his wife Merrilee moved to Arizona in 1973. From 1998 to 1999, he was president of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, sponsored by UNESCO. though she was uninjured.

Scientific explanation

Humean empiricism

According to the empiricist view associated with the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, we do not actually observe causes and effects, but merely experience constant conjunction of sensory events, and impute causality between the observations.

In the 20th century, as a formula to scientifically answer Why? questions, logical empiricist Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim explicated the deductive-nomological model (DN model). Concerning deterministic laws, the DN model characterizes scientific explanation as a logical form, whereby initial conditions plus universal laws entail an outcome via deductive inference, but no reference to causal relations.

Relevance/specificity

By 1970, Salmon had found that when seeking to explain probabilistic phenomena, we seek not merely high probability, but screen for causal influence by removing components of a system to find ones that alter the probability. Salmon sought to replace Hempel's IS model with Salmon's statistical-relevance model (SR model).

In 1948 when explicating DN model, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim had stated scientific explanation's semiformal conditions of adequacy (CA), but acknowledged redundancy of the third, empirical content (CA3), implied by the other three: derivability (CA1), lawlikeness (CA2), and truth (CA4). In the early 1980s, Salmon called for returning cause to because, and helped replace CA3 empirical content with CA3' strict maximal specificity. Yet ultimately, Salmon found mere modifications to the covering law model to be unsatisfactory. derivability from initial conditions plus natural laws (Hempel's covering law model). Yet Salmon found causality ubiquitous in scientific explanation, which identifies not only natural laws (empirical regularities), but accounts for them via nature's structure and thereby involves the ontic (concerning reality), Salmon criticized Bertrand Russell's theory of causal lines—forerunner of today's theories of causal processes—for involving the epistemic but neglecting the ontic, which causation is. Logic (1963) The Foundations of Scientific Inference (1967) Statistical Evidence and Statistical Relevance (1971) Space, Time, and Motion: A Philosophical Introduction (1975) Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (1984) Four Decades of Scientific Explanation (1990) Causality and Explanation (1998)