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Wesley C. Salmon.
The Foundations of Scientific Inference.
University of Pittsburgh Press. 1966

Not since Ernest Nagel’s 1939 monograph on the theory of probability has there been a comprehensive elementary survey of the philosophical problems of probability and induction. This is an authoritative and up-to-date treatment of the subject, and yet it is relatively brief and non-technical.

Hume’s skeptical arguments regarding the justification of induction are taken as a point of departure, and a variety of traditional and contemporary ways of dealing with this problem are considered. The author then sets forth his own criteria of adequacy for interpretations of probability. In the light of these criteria he analyzes contemporary theories of probability, as well as the older classical and subjective interpretations.

Wesley C. Salmon.
Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.
Princeton University Press. 1984

The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation—the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view (a version of the epistemic conception) is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically outdated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception.

Professor Salmon’s theory furnishes a robust argument for scientific realism akin to the argument that convinced twentieth-century physical scientists of the existence of atoms and molecules. To do justice to such notions as irreducibly statistical laws and statistical explanation, he offers a novel account of physical randomness. The transition from the “reviewed view” of scientific explanation (that explanations are arguments) to the causal/mechanical model requires fundamental rethinking of basic explanatory concepts.