Work · Analytic Philosophy
Experience and Prediction
Meaning and knowledge in terms of probability, the pragmatic justification of induction, and the separation of discovery from justification.
Introduction
Reichenbach wrote this book in Istanbul and published it in Chicago in 1938, his first major work in English. It presents a probability theory of meaning and knowledge: a statement has meaning if it can be given a degree of probability, and our knowledge of the external world consists of inductive “posits”. The first chapter introduces the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, which assigns the logical reconstruction of knowledge to philosophy and the actual process of finding to psychology. The book also contains his argument about a cubical world seen from inside, used to defend scientific realism against strict positivism, and his pragmatic justification of induction. The discovery–justification distinction became a standard reference point and, from the 1960s, a target of historians and sociologists of science.
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