How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Popper's Criterion of Falsifiability
Karl Popper maintains that the role of scientific tests is to refute or falsify theories not confirm them. So science, he says, makes fallible conjectures, the bolder the better. For Popper, science is built level by level, setting new knowledge on ...
Scientific Method: From Bacon to Popper, The
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about the impact of Sir Francis Bacon and Karl Popper on scientific inquiry. Ultimately, Professor Hacking concludes, science is neither all theory nor all experiment but, rather, an intimate interaction between what we...
Innate Ideas: Plato and the Meno
Philosopher Ian Hacking notes that Plato was fascinated by mathematics, and explains that his theory of innate ideas is based on the simple mathematical proof in his famous Socratic dialogue called the Meno.
How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Thomas Kuhn's Paradigms
In studying the way science has been conducted in different eras, Thomas Kuhn detects a striking pattern. Brief periods of revolution are set against a background of longer calmer periods which Kuhn calls "normal science." In a period of normal scie...
How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Popper's 20th-century View of How Science Works
Inductivism remains the dominant view of how science works until the 20th century when Albert Einstein proposes a new approach to gravity. This and early work in quantum mechanics prompts philosopher Karl Popper to propose a radically new view of ho...
Scientific Truth
Philosopher Ian Hacking makes the point that that there are many ways of looking at scientific truth, depending on the particular science involved. For example, he points out that botany, which he calls "basically a classificatory science," is very ...
How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Sir Francis Bacon, Spokesperson for the Scientific Revolution
Sir Francis Bacon, prominent philosopher of the Renaissance, rises to the rank of Lord Chancellor of England before he is convicted of accepting bribes. After a short time in jail, he retires to write and to conduct scientific experiments. Bacon cri...
How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: How Science Really Worked in the 17th-19th Centuries
Bacon's method of induction seems to work better for the experimental science of Robert Boyle than it does for the theoretical science of Isaac Newton, although Newton does describe his theory as "inferred from the phenomena." An alternative basis f...
How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Kuhn's Challenge to the Cumulative Progression of Science
Kuhn argues that scientists almost never follow Bacon's suggestion and simply observe nature. Rather, a paradigm influences what they observe and how they interpret it. Kuhn also agrees with Popper that induction does not properly describe how scien...
How Does Science Add to Knowledge?: Is There a Scientific Method?
One of the legacies of Thomas Kuhn is the recognition of diversity among the sciences. Our ability to make the world intelligible may be enriched if we are prepared to accept the legitimacy of all kinds of explanations. Science is not all theory or ...