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  1. (6 other versions)The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
    Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.
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  • (6 other versions)The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas Samuel Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Otto Neurath.
    A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...)
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  • Laws and symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...)
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  • The advancement of science: science without legend, objectivity without illusions.Philip Kitcher - 1993 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    During the last three decades, reflections on the growth of scientific knowledge have inspired historians, sociologists, and some philosophers to contend that scientific objectivity is a myth. In this book, Kitcher attempts to resurrect the notions of objectivity and progress in science by identifying both the limitations of idealized treatments of growth of knowledge and the overreactions to philosophical idealizations. Recognizing that science is done not by logically omniscient subjects working in isolation, but by people with a variety of personal (...)
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  • Progress and its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth.Larry Laudan - 1977 - University of California Press.
    (This insularity was further promoted by the guileless duplicity of scholars in other fields, who were all too prepared to bequeath "the problem of ...
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  • Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth.Stathis Psillos - 1999 - New York: Routledge.
    Scientific realism is the optimistic view that modern science is on the right track: that the world really is the way our best scientific theories describe it. In his book, Stathis Psillos gives us a detailed and comprehensive study which restores the intuitive plausibility of scientific realism. We see that throughout the twentieth century, scientific realism has been challenged by philosophical positions from all angles: from reductive empiricism, to instrumentalism and to modern sceptical empiricism. _Scientific Realism_ explains that the history (...)
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  • (5 other versions)The origin of species.Charles Darwin - 1859 - New York: Norton. Edited by Philip Appleman.
    In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a material, not divine, origin of species, he showed that new species are achieved by "natural selection." The Origin communicates the enthusiasm of original thinking in an open, descriptive style, and Darwin's emphasis on the value of diversity speaks more strongly now than ever. As well as a stimulating introduction and detailed notes, this edition offers a register of the many (...)
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  • The Scientific Image.William Demopoulos & Bas C. van Fraassen - 1982 - Philosophical Review 91 (4):603.
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  • (1 other version)A confutation of convergent realism.Larry Laudan - 1981 - Philosophy of Science 48 (1):19-49.
    This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific (...)
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  • Meaning and the Moral Sciences.Hilary Putnam - 1978 - Boston: Routledge.
    First published in 1978, this reissue presents a seminal philosophical work by professor Putnam, in which he puts forward a conception of knowledge which makes ethics, practical knowledge and non-mathematic parts of the social sciences just as much parts of 'knowledge' as the sciences themselves. He also rejects the idea that knowledge can be demarcated from non-knowledge by the fact that the former alone adheres to 'the scientific method'. The first part of the book consists of Professor Putnam's John Locke (...)
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  • (1 other version)Conjectures and Refutations.K. Popper - 1962 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 21 (3):431-434.
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  • Structural realism: The best of both worlds?John Worrall - 1989 - Dialectica 43 (1-2):99-124.
    The no-miracles argument for realism and the pessimistic meta-induction for anti-realism pull in opposite directions. Structural Realism---the position that the mathematical structure of mature science reflects reality---relieves this tension.
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  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.David Bohm - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (57):377-379.
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  • A novel defense of scientific realism.Jarrett Leplin - 1997 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Leplin attempts to reinstate the common sense idea that theoretical knowledge is achievable, indeed that its achievement is part of the means to progress in empirical knowledge. He sketches the genesis of the skeptical position, then introduces his argument for Minimalist Scientific Realism -- the requirement that novel predicitons be explained, and the claim that only realism about scientific theories can explain the importance of novel prediction.
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  • (1 other version)Laws and Symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 182 (3):327-329.
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  • (1 other version)A Confutation of Convergent Realism.Larry Laudan - 2001 - In Yuri Balashov & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings. New York: Routledge. pp. 211.
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  • What is Mathematical Truth?Hilary Putnam - 1979 - In Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, Mathematics, Matter and Method. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 60--78.
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  • (3 other versions)Progress and its problems: Towards a theory of scientific growth.L. Laudan - 1978 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (1):57-71.
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  • (2 other versions)The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions.John Dupre & Philip Kitcher - 1995 - Philosophical Review 104 (1):147.
    Philip Kitcher's book begins with a familiar historical overview. In the 1940s and 50s a confident, optimistic vision of science was widely shared by philosophers and historians of science. The goal of science was to discover the truth about nature, and over the centuries science had advanced steadily towards that goal; science discerned the real kinds of things of which the world was composed and the causal relations between them; the methods of science were rational and its deliverances objective; and (...)
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  • (2 other versions)The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions.Philip Kitcher - 1996 - Erkenntnis 44 (3):379-395.
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  • (2 other versions)The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions.Philip Kitcher - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (3):929-932.
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  • Kuhn's Evolutionary Social Epistemology.K. Brad Wray - 2011 - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
    Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core concepts of Structure (...)
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  •  .Stathos Psillos - unknown
    means exhaust the insults. This is unfortunate as their attitude turns a useful book, with valuable contributions from a number of writers, into a polemic.
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  • The Pessimistic Induction: A Bad Argument Gone Too Far.Moti Mizrahi - 2013 - Synthese 190 (15):3209-3226.
    In this paper, I consider the pessimistic induction construed as a deductive argument (specifically, reductio ad absurdum) and as an inductive argument (specifically, inductive generalization). I argue that both formulations of the pessimistic induction are fallacious. I also consider another possible interpretation of the pessimistic induction, namely, as pointing to counterexamples to the scientific realist’s thesis that success is a reliable mark of (approximate) truth. I argue that this interpretation of the pessimistic induction fails, too. If this is correct, then (...)
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  • Meaning and the Moral Sciences.John L. Koethe - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (3):460.
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  • A Confutation of the Pessimistic Induction.Seungbae Park - 2010 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (1):75-84.
    The pessimistic induction holds that successful past scientific theories are completely false, so successful current ones are completely false too. I object that past science did not perform as poorly as the pessimistic induction depicts. A close study of the history of science entitles us to construct an optimistic induction that would neutralize the pessimistic induction. Also, even if past theories were completely false, it does not even inductively follow that the current theories will also turn out to be completely (...)
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  • Are Unconceived Alternatives a Problem for Scientific Realism?Michael Devitt - 2011 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (2):285-293.
    Stanford, in Exceeding Our Grasp , presents a powerful version of the pessimistic meta-induction. He claims that theories typically have empirically inequivalent but nonetheless well-confirmed, serious alternatives which are unconceived. This claim should be uncontroversial. But it alone is no threat to scientific realism. The threat comes from Stanford’s further crucial claim, supported by historical examples, that a theory’s unconceived alternatives are “radically distinct” from it; there is no “continuity”. A standard realist reply to the meta-induction is that past failures (...)
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  • How the growth of science ends theory change.Ludwig Fahrbach - 2011 - Synthese 180 (2):139-155.
    This paper outlines a defense of scientific realism against the pessimistic meta- induction which appeals to the phenomenon of the exponential growth of science. Here, scientific realism is defined as the view that our current successful scientific theories are mostly approximately true, and pessimistic meta- induction is the argument that projects the occurrence of past refutations of successful theories to the present concluding that many or most current successful scientific theories are false. The defense starts with the observation that at (...)
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  • Why the ultimate argument for scientific realism ultimately fails.Moti Mizrahi - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (1):132-138.
    In this paper, I argue that the ultimate argument for Scientific Realism, also known as the No-Miracles Argument (NMA), ultimately fails as an abductive defence of Epistemic Scientific Realism (ESR), where (ESR) is the thesis that successful theories of mature sciences are approximately true. The NMA is supposed to be an Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) that purports to explain the success of science. However, the explanation offered as the best explanation for success, namely (ESR), fails to yield independently (...)
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  • Why Should We Be Pessimistic about Antirealists and Pessimists?Seungbae Park - 2017 - Foundations of Science 22 (3):613-625.
    The pessimistic induction over scientific theories holds that present theories will be overthrown as were past theories. The pessimistic induction over scientists holds that present scientists cannot conceive of future theories just as past scientists could not conceive of present theories. The pessimistic induction over realists :4321–4330, 2013) holds that present realists are wrong about present theories just as past realists were wrong about past theories. The pessimistic induction over antirealist theories :3–21, 2014) holds that the latest antirealist explanation of (...)
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  • Understanding the selective realist defence against the PMI.Peter Vickers - 2017 - Synthese 194 (9):3221-3232.
    One of the popular realist responses to the pessimistic meta-induction is the ‘selective’ move, where a realist only commits to the ‘working posits’ of a successful theory, and withholds commitment to ‘idle posits’. Antirealists often criticise selective realists for not being able to articulate exactly what is meant by ‘working’ and/or not being able to identify the working posits except in hindsight. This paper aims to establish two results: sometimes a proposition is, in an important sense, ‘doing work’, and yet (...)
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  • The Grand Pessimistic Induction.Seungbae Park - 2018 - Review of Contemporary Philosophy 17:7-19.
    After decades of intense debate over the old pessimistic induction (Laudan, 1977; Putnam, 1978), it has now become clear that it has at least the following four problems. First, it overlooks the fact that present theories are more successful than past theories. Second, it commits the fallacy of biased statistics. Third, it erroneously groups together past theories from different fields of science. Four, it misses the fact that some theoretical components of past theories were preserved. I argue that these four (...)
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  • What you don’t know can’t hurt you: realism and the unconceived.Anjan Chakravartty - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 137 (1):149-158.
    Two of the most potent challenges faced by scientific realism are the underdetermination of theories by data, and the pessimistic induction based on theories previously held to be true, but subsequently acknowledged as false. Recently, Stanford (2006, Exceeding our grasp: Science, history, and the problem of unconceived alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press) has formulated what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives: a version of the underdetermination thesis combined with a historical argument of the same form as the pessimistic induction. (...)
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  • The pessimistic induction and the exponential growth of science reassessed.K. Brad Wray - 2013 - Synthese 190 (18):4321-4330.
    My aim is to evaluate a new realist strategy for addressing the pessimistic induction, Ludwig Fahrbach’s (Synthese 180:139–155, 2011) appeal to the exponential growth of science. Fahrbach aims to show that, given the exponential growth of science, the history of science supports realism. I argue that Fahrbach is mistaken. I aim to show that earlier generations of scientists could construct a similar argument, but one that aims to show that the theories that they accepted are likely true. The problem with (...)
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  • Theory Change and Degrees of Success.Ludwig Fahrbach - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (5):1283-1292.
    Scientific realism is the position that success of a scientific theory licenses an inference to its approximate truth. The argument from pessimistic meta-induction maintains that this inference is undermined due to the existence of theories from the history of science that were successful, but false. I aim to counter pessimistic meta-induction and defend scientific realism. To do this, I adopt a notion of success that admits of degrees, and show that our current best theories enjoy far higher degrees of success (...)
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  • Selection and Predictive Success.K. Brad Wray - 2010 - Erkenntnis 72 (3):365-377.
    Van Fraassen believes our current best theories enable us to make accurate predictions because they have been subjected to a selection process similar to natural selection. His explanation for the predictive success of our best theories has been subjected to extensive criticism from realists. I aim to clarify the nature of van Fraassen’s selectionist explanation for the success of science. Contrary to what the critics claim, the selectionist can explain why it is that we have successful theories, as well as (...)
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  • Best theory scientific realism.Gerald Doppelt - 2014 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 4 (2):271-291.
    The aim of this essay is to argue for a new version of ‘inference-to-the-best-explanation’ scientific realism, which I characterize as Best Theory Realism or ‘BTR’. On BTR, the realist needs only to embrace a commitment to the truth or approximate truth of the best theories in a field, those which are unique in satisfying the highest standards of empirical success in a mature field with many successful but falsified predecessors. I argue that taking our best theories to be true is (...)
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  • A Pessimistic Induction against Scientific Antirealism.Seungbae Park - 2014 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 21 (1):3-21.
    There are nine antirealist explanations of the success of science in the literature. I raise difficulties against all of them except the latest one, and then construct a pessimistic induction that the latest one will turn out to be problematic because its eight forerunners turned out to be problematic. This pessimistic induction is on a par with the traditional pessimistic induction that successful present scientific theories will be revealed to be false because successful past scientific theories were revealed to be (...)
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  • Reconstructing Scientific Realism to Rebut the Pessimistic Meta‐induction.Gerald Doppelt - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (1):96-118.
    This paper develops a stronger version of ‘inference-to-the-best explanation’ scientific realism. I argue against three standard assumptions of current realists: realism is confirmed if it provides the best explanation of theories’ predictive success ; the realist claim that successful theories are always approximately true provides the best explanation of their success ; and realists are committed to giving the same sort of truth-based explanation of superseded theories’ success that they give to explain our best current theories’ success. On the positive (...)
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  • Selective Realism vs. Individual Realism for Scientific Creativity.Seungbae Park - 2017 - Creativity Studies 10 (1):97-107.
    Individual realism asserts that our best scientific theories are (approximately) true. In contrast, selective realism asserts that only the stable posits of our best scientific theories are true. Hence, individual realism recommends that we accept more of what our best scientific theories say about the world than selective realism does. The more scientists believe what their theories say about the world, the more they are motivated to exercise their imaginations and think up new theories and experiments. Therefore, individual realism better (...)
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  • Resisting the historical objections to realism: Is Doppelt’s a viable solution?Mario Alai - 2017 - Synthese 194 (9):3267-3290.
    There are two possible realist defense strategies against the pessimistic meta-induction and Laudan’s meta-modus tollens: the selective strategy, claiming that discarded theories are partially true, and the discontinuity strategy, denying that pessimism about past theories can be extended to current ones. A radical version of discontinuity realism is proposed by Gerald Doppelt: rather than discriminating between true and false components within theories, he holds that superseded theories cannot be shown to be even partially true, while present best theories are demonstrably (...)
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  • An antirealist explanation of the success of science.P. Kyle Stanford - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (2):266-284.
    I develop an account of predictive similarity that allows even Antirealists who accept a correspondence conception of truth to answer the Realist demand (recently given sophisticated reformulations by Musgrave and Leplin) to explain the success of particular scientific theories by appeal to some intrinsic feature of those theories (notwithstanding the failure of past efforts by van Fraassen, Fine, and Laudan). I conclude by arguing that we have no reason to find truth a better (i.e., more plausible) explanation of a theory's (...)
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  • Review of V erbal Behavior. [REVIEW]Noam Chomsky - 1959 - Language 35 (1):26--58.
    I had intended this review not specifically as a criticism of Skinner's speculations regarding language, but rather as a more general critique of behaviorist (I would now prefer to say "empiricist") speculation as to the nature of higher mental processes. My reason for discussing Skinner's book in such detail was that it was the most careful and thoroughgoing presentation of such speculations, an evaluation that I feel is still accurate. Therefore, if the conclusions I attempted to substantiate in the review (...)
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  • Meaning and the Moral Sciences.Kent Bach - 1979 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40 (1):137-139.
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  • Scientific Antirealists Have Set Fire to Their Own Houses.Seungbae Park - 2017 - Prolegomena 16 (1):23-37.
    Scientific antirealists run the argument from underconsideration against scientific realism. I argue that the argument from underconsideration backfires on antirealists’ positive philosophical theories, such as the contextual theory of explanation (van Fraassen, 1980), the English model of rationality (van Fraassen, 1989), the evolutionary explanation of the success of science (Wray, 2008; 2012), and explanatory idealism (Khalifa, 2013). Antirealists strengthen the argument from underconsideration with the pessimistic induction against current scientific theories. In response, I construct a pessimistic induction against antirealists that (...)
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  • Default privilege and bad lots: Underconsideration and explanatory inference.Kareem Khalifa - 2010 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (1):91 – 105.
    The underconsideration argument against inference to the best explanation and scientific realism holds that scientists are not warranted in inferring that the best theory is true, because scientists only ever conceive of a small handful of theories at one time, and as a result, they may not have considered a true theory. However, antirealists have not developed a detailed alternative account of why explanatory inference nevertheless appears so central to scientific practice. In this paper, I provide new defences against some (...)
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  • From Standard Scientific Realism and Structural Realism to Best Current Theory Realism.Gerald D. Doppelt - 2011 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (2):295-316.
    I defend a realist commitment to the truth of our most empirically successful current scientific theories—on the ground that it provides the best explanation of their success and the success of their falsified predecessors. I argue that this Best Current Theory Realism (BCTR) is superior to preservative realism (PR) and the structural realism (SR). I show that PR and SR rest on the implausible assumption that the success of outdated theories requires the realist to hold that these theories possessed truthful (...)
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  • Historical Inductions, Unconceived Alternatives, and Unconceived Objections.Moti Mizrahi - 2016 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 47 (1):59-68.
    In this paper, I outline a reductio against Stanford’s “New Induction” on the History of Science, which is an inductive argument against scientific realism that is based on what Stanford (2006) calls “the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives” (PUA). From the supposition that Stanford’s New Induction on the History of Science is cogent, and the parallel New Induction on the History of Philosophy (Mizrahi 2014), it follows that scientific antirealism is not worthy of belief. I also show that denying a key (...)
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  • Problems with Using Evolutionary Theory in Philosophy.Seungbae Park - 2017 - Axiomathes 27 (3):321-332.
    Does science move toward truths? Are present scientific theories (approximately) true? Should we invoke truths to explain the success of science? Do our cognitive faculties track truths? Some philosophers say yes, while others say no, to these questions. Interestingly, both groups use the same scientific theory, viz., evolutionary theory, to defend their positions. I argue that it begs the question for the former group to do so because their positive answers imply that evolutionary theory is warranted, whereas it is self-defeating (...)
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  • Truth and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge.Mary Hesse - 1976 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1976:261 - 280.
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