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?: 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...
Is Mind Distinct from Body?: Renes Descartes and the Mind-Body Problem
Descartes maintained that the entire universe consists of two substances, matter which exists in space and mind which has no spatial or physical properties. This doctrine becomes known as Cartesian dualism. Perhaps the hardest question for Cartesian...
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: W.V.O. Quine and Contemporary Empiricism
W.V.O. Quine, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, is a naturalist and an empiricist. Quine views science as a vast web of interconnected beliefs which is related to the sensory experience only "along the periphery." Vital c...
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Instrumental Side of Pragmatism, The
Pragmatic criteria guided early creatures in evolutionary history toward those activities that would enhance their survival. Similarly, in its application to science, pragmatism or instrumentalism as its sometimes called, looks for theories that are...