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Empiricism and Darwin's ScienceFred Wilson Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991, xiv + 358 pp., US$99.00

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Hannah Gay
Hannah Gay
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Type
Book Reviews/Comptes rendus
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Winter 1995 , pp. 176 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1995

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References

Notes

1 In the case of Wilson's thermodynamic example it seems fairly easy to think how it might be falsified. If the relationship between volume, temperature and pressure was different for a series of samples of the same gas treated in the same way, one might have cause to reconsider the truth of even this abstract axiom.

2 This can proceed by a kind of eliminative induction suggested long ago by Francis Bacon. I discussed this in connection with the empirical situation Wilson is interested in (how scientists use what he now calls “abstract” theory) in a paper published 17 years ago. See “The Assymetric Carbon Atom: (a) A Case Study of Independent Discovery; (b) An Inductivist Model for Scientific Method,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 9 (1978): 207–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.