POL 3371 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Karl Popper, Validity, Thomas Kuhn

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POL 3371
• Professor: Simeon M Itropolitski

Document Summary

Propositional claims: descriptive claims about the world that are either true or false. Propositional knowledge: rooted in a set of beliefs; beliefs must be true; true beliefs must be justified. Empiricists: believe that knowledge claims are justified through sensory experience. Rationalists: believe that we can grasp concepts and ideas regardless of sensory experience we can justify w/ our rational intuition; this knowledge is called a priori ( from the former ) Immanuel kant vouched for a combination of both; sensory experience might have a correspondence w/ something specific, our rational intuition further allows us to define this correspondence as cause and effect. Thomas bayes (english minister and mathematician, 1701-61) argued that beliefs are not simply either true or untrue or propositional; instead, he says that they are matters of degree and this degree changes as more information is gathered. Karl popper (1902-94) says that scientists should focus on disproving prevailing explanations rather than providing evidence to support competing claims.