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60Scientific Problems and ConstraintsPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978. 1978.In this paper the relation between scientific problems and the constraints on their solutions is explored. First the historical constraints on the solution to the blackbody radiation problem are set out. The blackbody history is used as a guide in sketching a working taxonomy of constraints, which distinguishes various kinds of reductive and nonreductive constraints. Finally, this discussion is related to some work in erotetic logic. The hypothesis that scientific problems can be identified with…Read more
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16John Lukacs. At the End of an Age. x + 230 pp., table, index. New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 2002. $22.95 (review)Isis 94 (2): 407-408. 2003.
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Scientific Discovery, Logic and Rationality. . Scientific Discovery : Case StudiesTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 44 (1): 169-170. 1982.
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1From natural philosophy to metaphilosophy of scienceIn P. Achinstein & R. Kagon (eds.), Kelvin’s Baltimore Lectures and Modern Theoretical Physics, Mit Press. pp. 507--541. 1987.
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12Review of Gary L. Hardcastle (ed.), Alan W. Richardson (ed.), Logical Empiricism in North America: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, XVIII (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (7). 2004.
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5Criticism and the History of Science: Kuhn's, Lakatos's, and Feyerabend's Criticisms of Critical Rationalism. Gunnar Andersson (review)Isis 87 (2): 396-397. 1996.
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23Positive Science and DiscoverabilityPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.Although seriously defective, 17th-century ideas about discovery, justification, and positive science are not as hopeless, useless, and out of date as many philosophers assume. They appear to underlie modern scientific practice. The generationist view of justification interestingly links justification with discovery issues while employing a concept of empirical support quite foreign to the modern, consequentialist concept, which identifies empirical evidence with favorable test results (predicti…Read more
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41Truth or Consequences? Generative versus Consequential Justification in SciencePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988. 1988.Pure consequentialists hold that all theoretical justification derives from testing the consequences of hypotheses, while generativists maintain that reasoning (some feature of) the hypothesis from we already know is an important form of justification. The strongest form of justification (they claim) is an idealized discovery argument. In the guise of H-D methodology, consequentialism is widely supposed to have defeated generativism during the 19th century. I argue that novel prediction fails to…Read more
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79Life at the frontier: The relevance of heuristic appraisal to policy (review)Axiomathes 19 (4): 441-464. 2009.Economic competitive advantage depends on innovation, which in turn requires pushing back the frontiers of various kinds of knowledge. Although understanding how knowledge grows ought to be a central topic of epistemology, epistemologists and philosophers of science have given it insufficient attention, even deliberately shunning the topic. Traditional confirmation theory and general epistemology offer little help at the frontier, because they are mostly retrospective rather than prospective. No…Read more
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