Wesley Charles Salmon (August 9, 1925 – April 22, 2001) was an American philosopher of science renowned for his work on the nature of scientific explanation.
[9] Yet ultimately, Salmon held statistical models to be but early stages, and lawlike regularities to be insufficient, in scientific explanation.
[3] For decades, his introductory textbook Logic was a standard, widely used, that went through multiple editions and was translated into several languages, including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.
[3] In 2001, traveling with his wife Merilee, also a philosopher of science, Wesley Salmon died suddenly in a car crash,[13][11] though she was uninjured.
[14] Recognizing that Kuhn's 1962 thesis in Structure of Scientific Revolutions was largely misunderstood—that Kuhn had not meant that scientific theory change is irrational but merely relative to the scientific community where the change occurs—Salmon believed that Bayesianism, which quantifies decisionmaking via subjective probability or "degree of belief", could help close the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the logical empiricist view versus the Kuhnian historical view of theory choice and change.
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).
[17] In the early 1980s, Salmon called for returning cause to because,[18] and helped replace CA3 empirical content with CA3' strict maximal specificity.
[8] As conventionally conceived by philosophers of science, scientific explanation of a phenomenon was simply epistemic (concerning knowledge), and centered on the phenomenon's counterfactual[19] derivability from initial conditions plus natural laws (Hempel's covering law model).
[20] Yet Salmon found causality ubiquitous in scientific explanation,[21] which identifies not only natural laws (empirical regularities), but accounts for them via nature's structure and thereby involves the ontic (concerning reality),[20] how the phenomenon "fits into the causal nexus" of the world (Salmon's causal/mechanical explanation).
[8] For instance, Boyle's law relates temperature, pressure, and volume of an ideal gas (epistemic), but this was later reduced to laws of statistical mechanics via average kinetic energy of colliding molecules composing the gas (ontic).