Induction, epistemic issues in

By Kaplan, Mark

Consider the following: ...

Science and values

The relationship between science and values is a complex one, with values having the potential to influence science either positively or negatively (see Values). On the positive side, ...

Science, 19th century philosophy of

By Butts, Robert E.

In the nineteenth century, science was organized, it tested and confirmed positive knowledge of the natural world and achieved remarkable theoretical development and hitherto unimagined practical application. Science ...

Underdetermination

By Laudan, Larry

The term underdetermination refers to a broad family of arguments about the relations between theory and evidence. All share the conclusion that evidence is more or less impotent ...

Russell, Bertrand Arthur William (1872–1970)

By Griffin, Nicholas

Bertrand Russell divided his efforts between philosophy and political advocacy on behalf of a variety of radical causes. He did his most important philosophical work in logic and ...

Epistemology

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Epistemology has been primarily concerned with propositional knowledge, ...

Inference to the best explanation

By Vogel, Jonathan

Inference to the best explanation is the procedure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data. The factors that make one explanation better than ...

Linguistics, philosophy of

By Rey, Georges; Blair, Dan

Although related to issues in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of linguistics is a largely distinct topic, being concerned not so much with language itself but with ...

Theoretical (epistemic) virtues

By Lycan, William G.

When two competing theories or hypotheses explain or accommodate just the same data (and both are unrefuted), which should be preferred? According to a classical, purely formal confirmation ...

Knowledge, concept of

By Klein, Peter D.

The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge is called epistemology (from the Greek epistēmē meaning knowledge, and logos meaning theory). ...

Empiricism

By Alston, William P.

In all its forms, empiricism stresses the fundamental role of experience. As a doctrine in epistemology it holds that all knowledge is ultimately based on experience. Likewise an ...

Epistemology

By Klein, Peter D.

Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophy. It is concerned with the nature, sources and limits of knowledge (see Knowledge, concept of). There is a vast ...

Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946)

By Schabas, Margaret

Keynes is best known as an economist but, in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and William Stanley Jevons, he also made significant contributions to inductive logic and ...

Inductive inference

By Maher, Patrick

According to a long tradition, an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form ‘all observed A are B’ to a conclusion of ...

Scepticism

By Cohen, Stewart

Simply put, scepticism is the view that we fail to know anything. More generally, the term ‘scepticism’ refers to a family of views, each of which denies that ...

Explanation

By Kitcher, Philip

Philosophical reflections about explanation are common in the history of philosophy, and important proposals were made by Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Mill. But the subject came of age ...

Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94)

By Jarvie, Ian C.

Popper belongs to a generation of Central European émigré scholars that profoundly influenced thought in the English-speaking countries in this century. His greatest contributions are in philosophy of ...

Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953)

By Salmon, Wesley C.

Philosophy of science flourished in the twentieth century, partly as a result of extraordinary progress in the sciences themselves, but mainly because of the efforts of philosophers who ...

Goodman, Nelson (1906–98)

Nelson Goodman (1906–98) was a twentieth century American philosopher who made important contributions to metaphysics, aesthetics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. His works display a concern with ...

Von Wright, Georg Henrik (1916–2003)

By Niiniluoto, Ilkka

G.H. von Wright was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Helsinki, Finland, von Wright did his early work on logic, probability ...

Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)

By Milton, J.R.

Along with Descartes, Bacon was the most original and most profound of the intellectual reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had little respect for the work ...

Confirmation theory

By Kuipers, Theo A.F.

The result of a test of a general hypothesis can be positive, negative or neutral. The first, qualitative, task of confirmation theory is to explicate these types of ...

Justification, epistemic

By Foley, Richard

The term ‘justification’ belongs to a cluster of normative terms that also includes ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘warranted’. All these are commonly used in epistemology, but there is no ...

Bayesian cognitive science

Bayesian cognitive science is a research programme that relies on modelling resources from Bayesian statistics for studying and understanding mind, brain, and behaviour. Conceiving of mental capacities as ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. His ...