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From Logical Systems to Conceptual Populations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Stephen Toulmin*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University

Extract

It is hardly news today to report that philosophers of science share a widespread feeling that methods of analysis which have served them well for half a century are reaching the limits of their usefulness. During much of the twentieth century, they have been concentrating on those aspects of science which lend themselves most readily to analysis using the tools of formal logic; they have given detailed, sophisticated accounts of the ways in which the general principles of a natural science are - or might conceivably be - applied to entail statements about its particular phenomena; and they have done much to make clearer the part played in natural science by logical systems. The resulting debate has been complex and on a high level of abstraction: primitive terms, protocol-statements, hypothetico-deductive systems, inductivism … verification, falsification, confirmation, corroboration, refutation ….

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1970

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