Philosophy Now Forum

This is a little off topic, but could you tell us a bit about what is meant by "good sense"? Read what Pierre Duhem says himself here: http://curiousleftist.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/pierre-duhem-on-good-sense-in-science/ The point, in a nutshell, is that logic and evidence alone can never...

Not all scientific hypotheses can be disproven or falsified but if only one can then this demonstrates that science uses negative proof or disproof. So how commonly or frequently it is used is entirely superfluous This is at odds with my understanding of the Duhem-Quine thesis which I believe holds...

It is possible that a proposition is only assumed to be known with certainty. Now an axiomatically deductive system of logic like mathematics can determine the truth value of a proposition as it uses proof to validate its conclusions. But an inductive system like science uses evidence that is less ...

Yeah, he's talking about the web of belief. That's not the same thing. He means something like confidence. Confidence and infallibility have little to do with one another, despite the fact that we can safely place confidence in what is infallible. Just because we are certain about something does no...

I don't think Quine is relevent here. Certainty and infallibility are two different things. I'm not sure I understand. It seems to me that "the truth of a statement S is known with certainty" is just another way of saying "our knowledge of the truth of statement S is infallible"...

A few random thoughts: It seems to me, first of all, that the question is somewhat misleading: surely it is not a thing which is fallible or infallible, but our (putative) knowledge of that thing. A tree is neither fallible nor infallible; it just is . The same goes for reality, mathematics, logic a...