Scientific Method A History and Philosophical Intro

The central theme running throughout this survey is the nature of the philosophical debate created by modern science's foundation in experimental and mathematical method. Key chapters critically discuss: Galileo's demonstrative method; Bacon's inductive method; and Newton's rules of reasoning; the rise of probabilistic "Bayesian" methods in the 18th-century; the method of hypotheses through the work of Herschel, Mill and Whewell; the conventionalist views of Poincare and Suhem; the inductivism of Peirce, Russell and Keynes; Popper's falsification compared with Reichenbach's enumerative induction; and Carnap's scientific method as Bayesian reasoning.