Justin Cruikshank came to my notice last week when I checked out Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the university library. You can read the abstract of the paper here, with notices of other recent works including a book of essays on Critical Realism.
This is his profile in the school of Sociology at the University of Birmingham.Taking up the argument from the abstract of the paper
“Sayer argues that Popper defended a logicist philosophy of science. The problem with such logicism is that it creates what is termed here as a `truncated foundationalism’, which restricts epistemic certainty to the logical form of scientific theories whilst having nothing to say about their substantive contents.”
At first glance, Sayer is wide of the mark, first of all, what has Popperis got to do with any kind of certainty, and second, the whole point of the falsification criterion is to demand some substantive content in a scientific theory. I liked the look of Justin’s counter-argument when I scanned it rapidly the other day.
