PHIL 1400 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Inductivism, Deductive Reasoning, Falsifiability
Document Summary
Popper as falsificationist; this reading offers a strong account of his methodology. Scientific hypotheses as invented by creative acts of the imagination. Tentative hypotheses are required to constrain and guide the search for data. Scientific objectivity as safeguarded by critical scrutiny (ie. experiments) Hypothetico-deductive method (hempel): invent a hypothesis by a creative act of the imagination, deduce a test implication from the hypotheses, test the hypotheses with an experiment or field observation based on the test implications, evaluate the hypothesis. H (hypothesis) - all copper expands when heated. I (implication) - if a piece of copper x is heated, then x will expand. Design a test - heat copper in the lab and see if it expands (prediction) Case study - mystery of the vacuum pump (nature abhors a vacuum) Parmenides, aristotle, and galileo all believed this (despite it being completely untestable) Torricelli had the hypothesis that the earth is surrounded by a sea of air.
