Wesley Salmon

Wesley Charles Salmon, known as Wesley Salmon, was an American philosopher of science renowned for his work on the nature of scientific explanation. He also worked on confirmation theory, seeking to explicate how probability theory, by way of inductive logic, might help confirm and choose between hypotheses. Salmon was most prominently a realist about causality in scientific explanation, though his realist account of causality drew considerable criticism; his books on scientific explanation were nonetheless landmarks of twentieth century philosophy of science and helped establish the important role of causality within it. Where logical empiricism, and especially Carl Hempel's covering law model of scientific explanation, had led most philosophers to treat scientific explanation as a matter of stating regularities rather than identifying causes, Salmon proposed the statistical relevance model to replace the covering law model's inductive statistical model, together with a requirement of strict maximal specificity to supplement the covering law model's other component, the deductive nomological model. He ultimately held that statistical models were only an early stage in scientific explanation, and that lawlike regularities alone were insufficient; he proposed that scientific explanation is properly a matter of causal and mechanical explanation.