Abstract
No one can doubt the extraordinary technological power that modern science has given to the western world. As Bertrand Russell put it:
Science, as a dominant factor in determining the beliefs of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful revolutionary force.1
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Notes
Bertrand Russell. The Impact of Science on Society. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952, p. 9.
Moritz Schlick. Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, 1918 (p. 73 of the Enlglish translation, General Theory of Knowledge, by A. E. Blumberg. New York: Springer-Verlag Wien, 1974 ).
Rudolf Carnap. Logical Foundations of Probability. London: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1950, pp. 70 f.
Jaakko Hintikka. Logic, Language-Games and Information. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, Chapters. I and XI, and Knowledge and the Known. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974, Chapter 7.
Harold Jeffreys. Theory of Probability, second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948, pp. 100 f.
Karl R. Popper. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Hutchinson, 1959, Appendix *viii.
A. J. Ayer, in The Problem of Knowledge, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1956, said that there are certain unbridgeable logical gaps that we are simply to take ‘in our stride’ (p. 80). He did not say when a gap becomes too wide to be taken in our stride.
P. F. Strawson, in Introduction to Logical Theory, London: Methuen, 1952, said that evidence may conclusively establish a theory even though it does not entail it (p. 234). He did not spell out what conditions must be satisfied for this important relation of non-deductive proof to hold. On the contrary, he insisted that no such conditions can be specified (p. 248). He adopted a “sealed lips” policy: there exist valid non-deductive inferences but we cannot say what their nature is.
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Watkins, J. (1987). A New View of Scientific Rationality. In: Pitt, J.C., Pera, M. (eds) Rational Changes in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 98. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3779-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3779-6_3
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