Barry Gower on Scientific Method.
The question that has to be asked about recent books on the philosophy of science is: Does this book explain the four “turns” that Karl Popper introduced? These are (1) the conjectural turn, to explain that even our best scientific theories may be false, (2) the objective turn to focus on scientific knowledge in its public or objective form, rather than subjective beliefs, (3) the social turn to be aware that the scientist works in a community and there is a need for conventions or “rules of the game” to maintain standards of criticism and best practice and (4) the rehabilitation of metaphysics, in defiance of the positivists and logical empiricists, in the form of “metaphysical research programs”.
This book does not score very well on that test however on the positive side the historical approach is very good, introducing concepts in relation to scientific episodes: Galileo on new methods for a new science, Francis Bacon on experiments, Newton on rules for reasoning, Herschel (the astronomer), Mill and Whewell on the use of hypotheses, Venn and Peirce on probabilities as frequencies, Keynes on probability logic, Reichenbach and Popper on induction.
