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Book
Author Miller, David (David W.)

Title Critical rationalism : a restatement and defence / David Miller
Published Chicago : Open Court, [1994]
©1994

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 W'PONDS  501 Mil/Cra  AVAILABLE
Description xiii, 264 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Contents 1. Conjectural Knowledge -- 2. Popper's Solution of the Problem of Induction -- 3. A Critique of Good Reasons -- 4. Comprehensively Critical Rationalism: An Assessment -- 5. Hume: Bacon = Godel: Hilbert -- 6. Three Lost Labours of Deductivism -- 7. On the Maximization of Expected Futility -- 8. Diverging Distributions -- 9. Objective Probabilities -- 10. Truth, Truthlikeness, Approximate Truth -- 11. Impartial Truth
Summary David Miller elegantly and provocatively reformulates critical rationalism by answering all its important critics. He presents a full defence of Popper's solution to the problem of induction, especially in the form which relates to practical decision-making. All known attempts to impeach Popper's solution as skeptical, irrationalist, or implicitly inductivist, are carefully considered and refuted. Critical Rationalism includes a detailed discussion of the role of probability in scientific method. Dr. Miller critically dissects the claims of Bayesianism, argues that objective probabilities do exist in the world, and proposes a new objectivist interpretation that makes sense of objective single-case probabilities even in a deterministic universe
Critical Rationalism, Popper's revolutionary approach to epistemology and scientific method, conceives human knowledge as consisting of unsupported guesses or conjectures. Investigation is therefore concerned, not with conclusively justifying our ideas - a hopeless endeavor - but with inventing new unjustified ideas and ejecting faulty ideas from the corpus of knowledge by criticism and refutation. The critical rationalist approach has been attacked by those who contend that it is little better than pure skepticism or irrationalism, or that it surreptitiously smuggles in the notion of inductive support
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [233]-252) and index
Subject Popper, Karl R. (Karl Raimund), 1902-1994. Logik der Forschung
Induction (Logic)
Rationalism.
Science -- Philosophy.
LC no. 94011205
ISBN 0812691970
0812691989 (paperback)