Scientific realism and the empiricist challenge: An introduction to Ernan McMullin's Aquinas lecture

Zygon 48 (1):131-142 (2013)
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Abstract

In The Inference That Makes Science, Ernan McMullin recounts the clear historical progress he saw toward a vision of the sciences as conclusions reached rationally on the basis of empirical evidence. Distinctive of this vision was his view of science as driven by a specific form of inference, retroduction. To understand this properly, we need to disentangle the description of retroductive inference from the claims made on its behalf. To end I will suggest that the real rival to McMullin's vision of science is not the methodologies he criticizes so successfully but a more radical empiricist alternative in epistemology

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Bas C. Van Fraassen
San Francisco State University

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References found in this work

The Empirical Stance.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 2002 - Yale University Press.
A case for scientific realism.Ernan McMullin - 1984 - In Jarrett Leplin (ed.), Scientific Realism. University of California. pp. 8--40.
The inference that makes science.Ernan McMullin - 1992 - Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

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