Understanding Scientific Reasoning, Fifth Edition, develops critical reasoning skills and guides students in the improvement of their scientific and technological literacy. The authors teach students how to understand and critically evaluate the scientific information they encounter in both textbooks and the popular media. With its focus on scientific pedagogy, Understanding Scientific Reasoning helps students learn how to examine scientific reports with a reasonable degree of sophistication. The book also explains how to reason through case studies using the same informal logic (...) skills employed by scientists and to analyse a complex series of propositions and hypotheses using sound scientific reasoning--Publisher's blurb. (shrink)

Normative naturalism (NN), advocated by Larry Laudan, understands the principles of scientific method to be akin to scientific hypotheses which are then open to test like any principles of science. It uses a meta-inductive rule to test methodological principles against suitably presented episodes in the history of science. One strength of NN is that it provides the basis for a philosophical/historical research programme into the methodological strategies actually employed in the sciences. But for the philosopher interested in the grounds of (...) scientific rationality NN is not without it difficulties such as: it adopts a strongly empiricist account of meta-method which rules out realist principles of scientific method from the test procedures; it uses principles of test which are either not agreed upon, or stray from the meta-inductive rule; it reveals its limits in presupposing answers, rather than offering solutions, to problems of scientific rationality. (shrink)