Discourse on science

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Epistemology The term “epistemology” replaces that of philosophy of science at the start of the 20th century. It is a neologism constructed by James Frederick Ferrier, in his work Institutes of metaphysics (1854). The word is composed on the Greek … Read More

Henri Poincaré, Morality and Science

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In the last half of the nineteenth century, we often dreamed of creating a scientific morality. It was not enough to boast the educative virtue of science, the advantages which the human soul derives for its own perfecting of the … Read More

Falsification and refutation

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Dogmatic falsifiability refers to scientific statements considered individually. These can be falsified and, depending on the outcome, scientific theories can be considered falsifiable and accepted, refuted, or can be maintained by adding ad-hoc hypotheses: ” There is one important method … Read More

Lakatos on justificationism

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The methodology of scientific research programmes is an improvement of Popper’s demarcation criterion between science and non-science, a theory of scientific rationality. For Popper, a theory is scientific only if it is empirically falsifiable, that is, if it is possible … Read More

Science and pseudoscience – Falsifiability

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The delimitation between science and pseudoscience is part of the more general task of determining which beliefs are epistemologically justified. Science can be described as partly descriptive, partly normative. A definition of science can focus on descriptive content and specify … Read More

Karl Popper’s demarcation problem

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Karl Popper, as a critical rationalist, was an opponent of all forms of skepticism, conventionalism and relativism in science. In 1935 he wrote Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft, later translating the book into English and publishing it under the … Read More

Epistemology and science

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Field of application of epistemology For a long time, epistemology has focused exclusively on the content of science, the history of this content, and the genealogy of the advances of this content. Science as a human institution was left to … Read More

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