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"One of the main tasks for human reason is to make the universe we live in understandable to ourselves. This is the task of science. There are two different components of about equal importance in this enterprise. The first is poetic inventiveness ..."
– Karl Popper
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Monthly Archives: July 2013
Kitcher on “scientific practice”
Writing on Darwin’s achievement in his 2003 book In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, Philip Kitcher advanced the concept of a scientific practice. This consists of: a language a set of statements that are accepted by the specific community … Continue reading
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Koertge on the moral subtext of Popperism
Interesting! I like to think of Popper as an argumentative carpenter and moralist! A complimentary review of The Myth of the Framework. And more.
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Philosophers emerging from the “sea”?
People who learned their evolutionary theory from the cartoonist Gary Larson will recall pictures of life emerging from the sea to colonise the land. This was a difficult transition and possibly the first life forms that made the journey were … Continue reading
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Justin Cruickshank again
Scanning old posts on the site I came upon a reference to a CR fellow traveller, Justin Cruickshank. Check out his website for publications of interest. I would really like authors to get in touch and tell me when they … Continue reading
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Philip Kitcher on the biological and social turns
Phillip Kitcher is one of the stars in the philosophical firmament. Born in London in 1947, he took a degree in maths and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge and a doctorate in HPS at Princeton where he … Continue reading
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Cracking the code and reading the invisible writing of Popperism
Ancient texts in unreadable languages have been cracked by picking up a handful of key words so that a pattern can be found. Much the same can happen in solving a murder mystery. Remember the puzzle books with complex line … Continue reading
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The Duhem-Quine Thesis Reconsidered – Part One
A popular criticism of Karl Popper is that his criterion of falsifiability runs aground on the Duhem-Quine thesis. That is, for any putative falsification, it’s always possible to preserve a scientific hypothesis by revising auxiliary hypotheses in its stead. For … Continue reading
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The Meta-Problem of Induction
Suppose that every problem of induction in the past has been solvable. What, then, justifies our expectation that future problems of induction are solvable? Answering induction merely presupposes that induction doesn’t have any unsolvable problems, because if it does have … Continue reading
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Nice review
A research scientist in New Zealand got in touch to say he enjoyed the Rathouse and when I told him about the Popular Popper series he wrote a very generous review of the Guide to The Logic of Scientific Discovery. … Continue reading
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The Quest for Doubt
[NOTE: In the following essay, I attribute views to philosophers without caveats or qualifications. This is mostly for ease of exposition. While I believe philosophers, both professional and amateur, have a tendency toward the views I attribute to them, there … Continue reading
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