PHILOS 8 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Selective Breeding, Agnosticism, Counterfactual Conditional
Document Summary
If you look at the history of science all you see is one paradigm being over- turned for the favor of another over and over again. Just when we think we got things right, a scientific revolution happens. Instrumentalism: science is just a tool like a hammer and it simply does not make sense to ask if a hammer actually exists or not. Theme of over-generalization in the philosophy of science not just by fields (chem, physics, etc. ) but also within a field. = scientific theories must be true, cause if they weren"t, it would be a huge coincidence that they are empirically adequate, science has to be on the right track / Miracle: no huge coincidences - inference to the best explanation: what is the best explanation of the fact that our current scientific theories are highly empirically adequate? (they save the phenomena)
