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?: 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...
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?: 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 ...
Is Reason the Source of Knowledge?: Meno: Platonic Proof of Innate Ideas, The
Plato gives a simple mathematical proof for innate ideas in a dialogue called the Meno. A slave boy, who has had no training in geometry, is asked by Socrates to produce a square double the area of a given square. Socrates will put no thoughts into ...
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...