Sir Francis Bacon And The Case For Curiosity
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about the contributions of Sir Francis Bacon to scientific inquiry. Professor Hacking notes that while Bacon's approach later came to be viewed as a model for how science should be done, during his lifetime, he didn't a...
Empiricism and Rationalism
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about the challenge of making a clear distinction between classic rationalists and empiricists. He notes that "there's an awful lot of theorizing to be found in those empiricists, and a lot of concern with experimentati...
Feyerabend and Kuhn
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, who were contemporaries at UC Berkeley in the late 1950's. Both were critical of the idea that there is some fixed, rational logic to science. But Feyerabend took the idea of openn...
Karl Popper and Falsification
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about Karl Popper's view that for a "bold guess" or hypothesis to be scientically valid, it must be testable or "falsifiable."