Simplicity (in scientific theories)

By Sober, Elliott

In evaluating which of several competing hypotheses is most plausible, scientists often use simplicity as a guide. This raises three questions: what makes one hypothesis simpler than another? ...

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 ...

Animal minds

By Andrews, Kristin

By examining the mind across species, we can make better progress on questions about the nature of the mind generally. While this has been acknowledged since ancient times, ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

Substance

By Benovsky, Jiri

To understand the notion of substance in a neo-Aristotelian way, one first needs to understand the notion of a kind since the core idea is that substances ...

Bayes, Thomas (1701–61)

By Callergård, Robert

Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister and mathematician who today is mostly remembered for a discovery in probability theory and statistics which in its general form has come ...

Science, philosophy of

By Worrall, John

Science grew out of philosophy; and, even after recognizable, if flexible, interdisciplinary boundaries developed, the most fruitful philosophical investigations have often been made in close connection with science ...

Reduction, problems of

By Kim, Jaegwon

Reduction is a procedure whereby a given domain of items (for example, objects, properties, concepts, laws, facts, theories, languages, and so on) is shown to be either absorbable ...