Logic and philosophy of science i

Notes from Logic and Philosophy of Science I

Everyone of the topics below is summarized in the course’s Supersummary.

Course introduction

Introduction to Logic and Philosophy of Science I

The Scientific method

1. Aristotelian logic
2. Francis Bacon
3. Hume in Logic and Philosophy of Science I
4. Bertrand Russel
5. Pragmatic Justification (Hans Reichenbach)
6. Logical Positivism
   • Alfred Jules Ayer
7. Peter Frederick Strawson
8. Karl Popper
9. Post-Popperian interpretations
   1. Logical objections to Popper
   2. Historical objections to Popper
      1. Imre Lakatos
      2. Thomas Kuhn
   3. Methodological objections to Popper
      1. Paul Feyerabend

The scientific explanation

1. Introduction to Scientific explanation +++
2. Carl Hempel (The Deductive-nomological model)
3. Nancy Cartwright
4. Truth of scientific laws
5. Testing the hypotheses

Natural kinds

• A premise on Modal Logic
• Natural kinds

Social kinds

Exam

• 3 questions in 2h
• average answer is between 500-800 words

Answering the questions

• questions will be actual questions, not descriptive, specific
• planning the answers
• decide whether what’s valuable to include or not, add enough content and background knowledge to make the argument valuable
• the answer has to be structured and it must follow a path, consequential steps of reasoning
• personal opinions are welcome if argumented

Evaluation criteria

• understanding
• argument
• organization
• clarity

Examples

Does inventing hypotheses rely on logic in science?

Is Popper’s logical criterion of falsification a convincing response to Hume’s problem of induction?