The Logic of Scientific DiscoveryThe Logic of Scientific Discovery is a 1959 book about the philosophy of science by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 (imprint '1935') German original, titled Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft, which literally translates as, "Logic of Research: On the Epistemology of Modern Natural Science"'. Popper argues that science should adopt a methodology based on falsifiability, because no number of experiments can ever prove a theory, but a reproducible experiment or observation can refute one.
UnobservableAn unobservable (also called impalpable) is an entity whose existence, nature, properties, qualities or relations are not directly observable by humans. In philosophy of science, typical examples of "unobservables" are the force of gravity, causation and beliefs or desires. The distinction between observable and unobservable plays a central role in Immanuel Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena as well as in John Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities.
Non-scienceA non-science is an area of study that is not scientific, especially one that is not a natural science or a social science that is an object of scientific inquiry. In this model, history, art, and religion are all examples of non-sciences. Demarcation problem Since the 17th century, some writers have used the word science to exclude some areas of studies, such as the arts and the liberal arts. The word nonscience, to describe non-scientific academic disciplines, was first used in the middle of the 19th century.
Heideggerian terminologyMartin Heidegger, the 20th-century German philosopher, produced a large body of work that intended a profound change of direction for philosophy. Such was the depth of change that he found it necessary to introduce many neologisms, often connected to idiomatic words and phrases in the German language. Two of his most basic neologisms, present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, are used to describe various attitudes toward things in the world. For Heidegger, such "attitudes" are prior to, i.e.
Fashionable NonsenseFashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1998; UK: Intellectual Impostures), first published in French in 1997 as Impostures intellectuelles, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. The book was published in English in 1998, with revisions to the original 1997 French edition for greater relevance to debates in the English-speaking world.
Normal scienceNormal science, identified and elaborated on by Thomas Samuel Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is the regular work of scientists theorizing, observing, and experimenting within a settled paradigm or explanatory framework. Regarding science as puzzle-solving, Kuhn explained normal science as slowly accumulating detail in accord with established broad theory, without questioning or challenging the underlying assumptions of that theory. Kuhn stressed that historically, the route to normal science could be a difficult one.
History and philosophy of scienceThe history and philosophy of science (HPS) is an academic discipline that encompasses the philosophy of science and the history of science. Although many scholars in the field are trained primarily as either historians or as philosophers, there are degree-granting departments of HPS at several prominent universities. Though philosophy of science and history of science are their own disciplines, history and philosophy of science is a discipline in its own right.
Deductive-nomological modelThe deductive-nomological model (DN model) of scientific explanation, also known as Hempel's model, the Hempel–Oppenheim model, the Popper–Hempel model, or the covering law model, is a formal view of scientifically answering questions asking, "Why...?". The DN model poses scientific explanation as a deductive structure, one where truth of its premises entails truth of its conclusion, hinged on accurate prediction or postdiction of the phenomenon to be explained.
VerisimilitudeIn philosophy, verisimilitude (or truthlikeness) is the notion that some propositions are closer to being true than other propositions. The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory. This problem was central to the philosophy of Karl Popper, largely because Popper was among the first to affirm that truth is the aim of scientific inquiry while acknowledging that most of the greatest scientific theories in the history of science are, strictly speaking, false.
Confirmation holismIn philosophy of science, confirmation holism, also called epistemological holism, is the view that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by an empirical test, but rather that only a set of statements (a whole theory) can be so. It is attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine who motivated his holism through extending Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination in physical theory to all knowledge claims. Duhem's idea was, roughly, that no theory of any type can be tested in isolation but only when embedded in a background of other hypotheses, e.
