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The advance of technology shows that "knowledge
is growing in science."
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Science progresses in ways that other kinds of
human cognitive pursuits, like literature and the arts, do not.
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Potential predictivity is necessary and suffices
for scientific explanation.
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Inductive inference from cases to laws (generalization)
or the from the past to the future (prediction) is rationally unwarranted.
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Bayes' theorem provides an emminently reasonable
approach to induction.
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Scientific paradigms are rationally incommensurable.
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There is observational common ground between
paradigms (or theories) making paradigm-neutral (or theory-neutral) observation
possible.
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There is no pure observation level free from
any theoretical influence.
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Scientists should strive be a presuppostion free
as they can in making observations.
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Scientific theories deal with a world independent
of human history and human intervention.
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Even if the history of science is discontinuous
and fragmented this has no relativistic implications.
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Apply Aristotle's four causal analysis to (A)
the case of a house and (B) the case of a horse and discuss the role (if
any) of each of the four causes in modern, mechanistic science.
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"[O]ur knowledge of the world is anchored in
our sensory interactions with the world." (96)
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"The very ease and rapidity with wich astronomers
saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make
us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different
world." (Kuhn: 66)
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There are methods of justification but there
are no methods of discovery.
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"Statements or systems of statements, in order
to be ranked as scientific, must be capable of conflicting with possible
or conceivable observations." (p.58)
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Empirical falsifiability is the distinguishing
mark of a scientific theory.
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Theories are never conclusively falsified.
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"[T]otal science is like a field of force whose
boundary conditions are experience. ... No particular experiences
are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field,
except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field
as a whole." (Quine)
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