BHPS Important Personalities
BHPS Important Personalities
BHPS Important Personalities
HPS
A. Francis Bacon F. Thomas Kuhn
• He believed that when approached this way, science could become a tool
for the betterment of humankind.
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The scienti c method (in Novum Organum):
2nd "Table of Presence," -list of circumstances under which the event being studied occurred.
4th "Table of Comparison" allows the observer to compare and contrast the severity or degree of the event.
• Father of Induction
the gathering of large numbers of facts and the detection of patterns.
pyramid of disciplines with natural history forming the base, physics above and subsuming it,
and metaphysics at the peak, explaining everything below–though perhaps in powers and
forms beyond the grasp of man. (-from E.O. Wilson)
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Theories of errors
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The common picture of Descartes is as one who proposed that all
science become demonstrative in the way Euclid made geometry
demonstrative, namely as a series of valid deductions from self-
evident truths, rather than as something rooted in observation and
experiment. Descartes is usually portrayed as one who defends
and uses an a priori method to discover infallible knowledge, a
method rooted in a doctrine of innate ideas that yields an
intellectual knowledge of the essences of the things with which we
are acquainted in our sensible experience of the world.
https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes-scienti c-method/
#:~:text=The%20common%20picture%20of%20Descartes,rooted%20in%20observation%20and%20experiment.
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C. Pierre Duhem
•best known for his work on the relation between theory and experiment,
arguing that hypotheses are not straightforwardly refuted by experiment
and that there are no crucial experiments in science.
•For Duhem“the only thing the experiment teaches us is that, among all the
propositions used to predict the phenomenon and to verify that it has not
been produced, there is at least one error; but where the error lies is just
what the experiment does not tell us”
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D. Carl Hempel
The Raven Paradox
The Paradox of Con rmation
https://youtu.be/Ca_sxDTPo60?
si=fHvDhyWMTJedLC3J
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All ravens are black
Falsi cation
Paradigm Shift
E. Thomas Kuhn
Phases
1. Pre-paradigmatic
2. Normal Science
3. Crisis
4. Scienti c revolution
Pierre Duhem - Underdetermination -holistic (cannot take in isolation) and contrastive (questions
the ability of the evidence to con rm any given hypothesis against alternatives)
Carl Hempel - Paradox of Con rmation; Raven paradox; two opposing hypotheses, couldn’t there
be a third?