Wesley C. Salmon

Who was Wesley C. Salmon?

Wesley C Salmon, an American contemporary philosopher, attained especial prominence for reviewing, criticizing, and revising philosophers' concepts of scientific explanation. Meanwhile, his coverage of introductory logic was long a standard textbook internationally. And he sought to help resolve confirmation theory, whereby probability theory has been applied via inductive logic in attempts to confirm and choose hypotheses. Most prominently, Salmon found causality central in scientific explanation, although his explanation of causality, then, drew ample criticism. Still, his books on scientific explanation itself were landmarks of the 20th century's philosophy of science, and solidified recognition of causality's important roles in scientific explanation, whereas causality itself has evaded satisfactory elucidation by anyone.

Traditionally, averting obstacles to scientific realism—whereby scientific theories are taken at face value, as it were, conceived to provide true knowledge of unobservable aspects, including entities, natures, processes, and causation—philosophers viewed scientific explanation as modeling simply lawlike regularities, a view embodied in the covering law model. Salmon introduced the statistical-relevance model, aimed to replace the covering law model's inductive-statistical model, and proposed strict maximal specificity as a criterion supplementing the covering law model's other component, the deductive-nomological model. Yet ultimately, Salmon found statistical models to be but early stages, and and lawlike regularities to unsatisfactory, in scientific explanation. As the more actual manner of scientific explanation, Salmon proposed causal/mechanical explanation.