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Wednesday 22nd February: DIAS General Interest Seminar – ‘Recent Trends in the Philosophy of Science’

Title: Recent Trends in the Philosophy of Science

Speaker: Dr Finnur Dellsén (University College Dublin)

Abstract: Many working scientists are familiar with Karl Popper’s vision of science as the concerted effort to falsify extent theories and replace them with new theories that make bold predictions about unobserved events. Popper’s ideas have been less influential among philosophers of science, due to a number of arguably devastating problems with his underlying approach. This talk will survey some of the more influential criticisms of Popper, and go on to discuss two other influential ways of thinking about science, viz. Thomas Kuhn’s idea of ‘paradigms’ as the basic unit of real scientific change, and the ‘Bayesian’ idea of scientific confirmation as grounded in subjective probability-assignments.

Time: Wednesday 22nd February 2017, 4.00pm.

Place: Lecture Room, School of Theoretical Physics, DIAS, 10 Burlington Road, Dublin 4.