The American philosopher of science Wesley Charles Salmon was born August 9 in Detroit, Michigan, and died April 22 near Madison, Ohio. He pursued undergraduate studies at Wayne University and the University of Chicago Divinity School, received an MA in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1947, and a PhD in philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1950. His principal academic appointments were at Brown University, Indiana University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Pittsburgh; he retired from this last institution in 1999. At UCLA his dissertation advisor was the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach and much of Salmon's subsequent work was influenced by Reichenbach's philosophy. A lifelong defender of empiricism, Salmon made significant contributions to a wide range of topics, primarily in explanation, causation, inductive inference, and the philosophy of probability.

Work

Beginning in 1971, Salmon developed a widely discussed alternative to...