Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

"I regard it as a truly seminal work in this field." — Professor William A. Wallace, author of Causality and Scientific Explanation. Non-technical and clearly written, this book focuses on the place of the casual principle in modern science. The author defines the terminology, describes various formulations, examines the two primary critiques of causality, and more.

Introduction: Science and Common Sense Long before the beginnings of modern civilization, men ac- quired vast funds of information about their environment. ...

Recent discussions in the philosophy of science have devoted considerable attention to the analysis of conceptual issues relating to the methodology of explanation and prediction in the sciences. Part of this literature has been devoted to clarifying the very ideas of explanation and prediction. But the discussion has also ranged over various related topics, including the status of laws to be used for explanatory and predictive purposes, the logical interrelationships between explanatory and predictive reasonings, the differences in the strategy of (...) explanatory argumentation in different branches of science, the nature and possibility of teleological explanation, etc. The aim of the present article is to examine the issues involved in such questions from the specialized perspective afforded by one particular kind of physical systems--namely, systems, here to be characterized as discrete state systems, whose behavior has been studied extensively in the scientific literature under the general heading of Markov chains. These systems have been chosen as our focus because their behavior over time can be analyzed at once with great ease and with extraordinary precision. (shrink)

When asked in 1962 on what he was working Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz replied: Several years ago Polish Scientific Publishers suggested that I pre pare a new edition of The Logical Foundations of Teaching, which I wrote 1 before 1939 as a contribution to The Encyclopaedia of Education. It was a small booklet covering elementary information about logical semantics and scientific methodology, information which in my opinion was necessary as a foundation of teaching and as an element of the education of any (...) teacher. When I recently set to preparing the new edition, I rewrote practically everything, and a booklet of some 100 pages swelled into a bulky volume almost five times bigger. The issues have remained practically the same, but they are now analysed much more thoroughly and the threshold of difficulty is much higher now. The main stress has been laid on the methods used in the empirical sciences, and within that field, on the theory of measurement and the methods of statistical inference. I am now working on the last chapter of the book, concerned with explanation procedures and theory construction in the empirical sciences. When that book, which I intend to entitle Pragmatic Logic, is com pleted I intend to prepare for the press Vol. 2 of my minor writings, 2 Language and Cognition, which will cover some of my post-war pa pers. (shrink)