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Reply to David L. Miller's Comments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Carl G. Hempel
Affiliation:
Yale University Princeton, New Jersey
Paul Oppenheim
Affiliation:
Yale University Princeton, New Jersey

Abstract

Like a number of other authors, Miller uses the term “emergent” interchangeably with “unpredictable” and employs it as a property term, i.e., in contexts of the form “Event E is emergent.” As we showed in our article, however, predictability and unpredictability as well as emergence are relations; they can be predicated of an event only relatively to some body of information. Thus, a lunar eclipse is predictable by means of information including (a) data on the locations and speeds, at some particular time, of the celestial bodies involved, and (b) the laws of celestial mechanics plus certain principles of optics; it is unpredictable on the basis of, say, (b) alone. Consequently, the phrase “Event E is unpredictable” is incomplete, and hence meaningless, in much the same sense as the expression “Straight line l is parallel.” Similar observations apply to the term “emergent,” which is frequently used to characterize events which, in a sense examined in detail in our article, are not explainable by a micro-structure theory.

Type
Reply
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1948

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References

1 Hempel, Carl G. and Oppenheim, Paul. Studies in the logic of explanation. This journal, vol. 15 (1948), pp. 135–175.

2 l.c., p. 158.

3 cf. Tarski, Alfred. The semantical conception of truth, and the foundations of semantics. Philosophy and phenomenological research, vol. 4 (1944), pp. 341–376.

4 On the avoidability of the concept of truth cf. Tarski, l.c., section 16.

5 l.c., p. 158.