Theory and Reality: Philosophy of Science Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering fundamental concepts, terminology, and historical figures in the philosophy of science based on the provided text.

Scientia

A Latin word meaning knowledge, historically referring particularly to the results of logical demonstrations that reveal general and necessary truths, usually associated with mathematics and geometry.

Natural Philosophy

A term used around the seventeenth century for scientific fields inquiring into the causes of things, such as physics and astronomy.

Natural History

A term used around the seventeenth century for scientific fields describing the contents of the world, such as botany and zoology.

William Whewell

The nineteenth-century scholar who coined the term "scientist."

Epistemology

The branch of philosophy that deals with questions involving the nature of knowledge, the justification of beliefs, and rationality.

Metaphysics

The branch of philosophy that deals with the most general questions about the nature of reality itself.

Descriptive Theory

A theory that attempts to describe what actually goes on in an area or what something is actually like, without making value judgments.

Normative Theory

A theory that makes value judgments, addressing what should go on or what might be good or bad.

Empiricism

A family of philosophical views asserting the fundamental importance of experience as the source of genuine knowledge, justification, and rationality.

Sensationalism

A form of classical empiricism asserting that sensations are all the mind has access to, viewing the mind largely as a pattern-recognition device.

Skepticism

The philosophical view that we cannot know anything, or can know much less than is usually supposed, about the world and its workings.

External-World Skepticism

A form of skepticism that questions whether we can ever know anything about a physical world lying behind our flow of sensations.

Inductive Skepticism

A form of skepticism, vividly raised by David Hume, questioning why we should expect patterns observed in past experience to hold in the future.

Phenomenalism

An empiricist view holding that we only deal with sensations and that "the world" is best understood as a patterned collection of sensations.

Rationalism

The philosophical view, held by thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz, that pure reasoning can be a route to knowledge that does not depend on experience.

Verifiability Theory of Meaning

A logical positivist position asserting that the meaning of a sentence consists in its method of verification, making unverifiable sentences meaningless.

Analytic Statement

A statement that is true or false purely in virtue of the meaning of the words within it, regardless of how the world happens to be.

Synthetic Statement

A statement that is true or false in virtue of both the meaning of its words and how the world actually is.

A Priori Knowledge

Knowledge that is known or knowable independently of evidence gained via experience.

A Posteriori Knowledge

Knowledge that relies on evidence gained from experience.

Deductive Inference

An argument pattern that transmits truth with certainty, where true premises guarantee a true conclusion.

Inductive Logic

A proposed logic of arguments that provide support or probability for conclusions without offering the absolute guarantee of deductive logic.

Context of Discovery vs. Context of Justification

Hans Reichenbach's distinction separating the historical and psychological study of scientific creation from the logical analysis of scientific structure.

Operationalism

The view that scientists should tie all theoretical terms directly to specific observational tests and procedures.

Duhem-Quine Thesis

Also known as holism about testing, the thesis that theoretical hypotheses cannot be tested in isolation because they require background assumptions to yield testable predictions.

Scientific Realism

The view that science attempts to describe hidden, unobservable structures that give rise to observable phenomena.

Inductive Generalization

A non-deductive argument that uses observations of specific cases to reach a general conclusion about a broader population.

Statistical Syllogism

A non-deductive argument that uses a general statistical claim to draw a conclusion about a specific case.

Argument from Analogy

A non-deductive argument that compares two similar things in certain respects to infer that they are also similar in another respect.

Inference to the Best Explanation

Also known as abduction, a non-deductive argument that starts with evidence and selects the hypothesis that best accounts for that evidence.

Hypothetico-Deductivism

A view of testing where hypotheses are confirmed when true observational predictions are logically derived from them.

Ravens Problem

Carl Hempel's paradox of confirmation showing that observing a nonblack non-raven (such as a white shoe) logically confirms the hypothesis "All ravens are black."

Curve-Fitting Problem

The problem where infinitely many mathematical functions can fit any given set of data points, predicting different values for cases such as $x = 4$, demonstrating that formal logic alone cannot dictate curve choice.

Problem of Demarcation

The problem of defining the boundary line between science and non-science.

Falsificationism

Karl Popper's criterion stating that a theory is scientific if and only if it takes risks by prohibiting certain observations and is capable of being refuted.

Fallibilism

The philosophical position that human knowledge is never completely certain or immune to error.

Corroboration

Karl Popper's term for a theory that has survived rigorous attempts at falsification, representing a backward-looking assessment of past performance rather than a prediction of future reliability.

Paradigm

Thomas Kuhn's concept of a comprehensive framework in a scientific field, encompassing shared theoretical claims, research methods, and habits of scientific thought.

Normal Science

Scientific research conducted within the framework provided by an established paradigm, focused primarily on puzzle-solving.

Anomaly

A puzzle or experimental result that persistently resists solution within an existing scientific paradigm.

Incommensurability

The idea that competing paradigms cannot be directly compared or evaluated using a neutral, common standard of language or measurement.