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...
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 Theories and Realism
Philosopher Hilary Putnam argues that it is futile for philosophers of science to try to come up with a single, one-size-fits-all model that can be used to validate all scientific theories.
Does Science Give Us Truth?: Conflict Between Consensus Theories of Truth and Popper's Scientific Realism
Agreement in a community of scientists can also be taken as a measure of truth, a human-centered concept that Arthur Fine calls "consensus theories of truth." In looking at the shift from Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity to Albert Einstein's, Ka...
Thomas Kuhn
Philosopher Ian Hacking talks about Thomas Kuhn's notion that science is very much a historical process--one in which breakthroughs often come at unexpected or unpredictable times, rather than at regular intervals. He also discusses Kuhn's notion of...
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."