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 ...
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?: 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?: Bacon's Method of Scientific Induction
Bacon urges scientists to use a method which he calls "induction." Make a number of observations, look for general patterns, then test those patterns before proposing the underlying law of nature at work. Particularly critical to the process is cond...
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 ...
What is Philosophy?: Relationship of Philosophy to Other Fields of Thought
What is philosophy? How is it related to other fields of thought? How is it different? In response to these questions, nine preeminent scholars create an insightful view of philosophy and the role it plays in contemporary society.
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: John Locke's Empiricism and Its Troublesome Gap
John Locke and later empiricists dispute the rationalists' claim that pure reason could grasp truths about the world. They argue that all knowledge of the world must come through the senses and experience. Locke compares the mind at birth to a tabul...
Is Reason the Source of Knowledge?: Necessary Truths
Descartes argues that the senses can perceive only the changing surfaces of things, but the mind can go deeper to find necessary truths. Empiricist who argue that all knowledge must come from the senses disagree.
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Existence of an External Word...Real or Imagined?, The
Can we be certain our perceptions are backed up by an external world? Hume is skeptical. "Here experience is, and must be entirely silent." According to Hume we have no good reason for believing in the existence of an external world. We have to beli...