Gunnell on “Deductivism,” the “Logic” of Science and Scientific Explanation: A Riposte

A. James Gregor

American Political Science Review, 1969, vol. 63, issue 4, 1251-1258

Abstract: It is impossible to tender a reply to Professor Gunnell's essay, “Deduction, Explanation and Social Scientific Inquiry,” that would be both brief and adequate. It would be impossible to be brief because Gunnell conjures up a tagraggery of issues, none of which he seems prepared and/or disposed to resolve. But no matter how extensive a reply might be, it would still be impossible to conceive it as adequate for I am not sure that I, or anyone else, can determine precisely what he means to say in the essay before us. It is impossible for me to determine with any specificity whatsoever, for example, what it means to say: Logical empiricism as an approach to the philosophy of science has been concerned with developing formal representations or reconstructions of the logical structure of scientific explanation and with a meta-logical analysis of the language applied to science. In this view there is a very strict correlation between the philosophy of science and formal logic. I haven't the foggiest notion what a “metalogical analysis of the language applied to science” might mean. I had always understood “metalogic” to refer to discourse employing logic as its object language—just as metamathematics would be a language employed in the analysis of mathematics as an object language.

Date: 1969
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