Category Archives: Uncategorized

Two  reviewed on Amazon.  Sosa and  Okasha. And another, not listed on Amazon US David E. Cooper, World Philosophies: An Historical Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.  530 pp This is a very ambitious book, large enough to provide potentially useful information … Continue reading →

Another very unsatisfactory introduction to the philosophy of science. So far Popper’s critique of inductive logic has not been effectively answered, although some people like to use the term to apply to (1) the process of forming a hypothesis or … Continue reading →

Popper refused to be drawn into the “logic” or methods of discovery, his focus was the logic of criticism and testing. The nearest that he came to advice on this topic was in the 1983 Preface to the first volume of … Continue reading →

A tacit assumption common in arguments concerning the scientific method, criteria of demarcation, experimental procedures, and so forth, is that scientific methods should be like effective methods for empirical problems. In logic, an effective method is a procedure for computing the … Continue reading →

The debate concerning so-called ‘theories of truth’ has always stumped me, because it seems prima facie absurd. When I use the predicate ‘is true’, what I’m referring to is correspondence to the facts. The purpose of all my investigations is, … Continue reading →

The Gordian Knot is a legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem solved easily by cheating or ‘thinking outside the box.’ In Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Karl … Continue reading →

Prompted by Ken’s post on CR and the Austrians, here is the abstract of a paper being prepared for publication or perhaps delivery at a conference in Texas  in November on the theme “Austrian Thought and its Legacy”. This paper … Continue reading →

Despite denying the existence of justification and stressing our pervasive fallibility, critical rationalists are actually epistemological optimists. That is, we believe that progress is not only possible but actually the norm. While error is ubiquitous, most of our attempts to … Continue reading →

This is a long paper that Gombrich contributed to the Schilpp volume for Popper.

The paper on Bartley’s contribution to Hayek’s last book has been revised and has gone off to join a collection of papers about Hayek. The aim of this paper is to introduce the idea of the authoritarian framework of western thought, to … Continue reading →