In the philosophy of science, antirealism is any view that denies that we know that even our best scientific theories refer to mind-independent unobservable entities.
deduction
Deduction is inference in accordance with the laws of logic.
demarcation problem
The problem of providing a general rule or criterion for distinguishing science from non-science, and especially for distinguishing genuine science from activities or theories that are claimed to be scientific but which are not.
epistemology
The division of philosophy which examines the nature, extent and justification of knowledge, also known as "theory of knowledge".
hypothetico-deductivism
A theory of the scientific method according to which science proceeds by the generation of hypotheses, from which predictions are deduced that can be tested by experiment.
falsification
The theory of the scientific method originated by Popper and developed by Lakatos, according to which science is fundamentally about trying to falsify theories rather than trying to find evidence in their favour.
induction
The process of inferring a general law or principle from the observation of particular instances.
logical positivism
A school of philosophy of the first half of the twentieth century, aiming to combine empiricism and advances in logic to show all outstanding philosophical problems could be shown to be linguistic and solved by analysis or explication, or rational reconstruction of language. Logical positivists followed empiricists in holding that the only meaningful terms and statements refer to what expeience can verify, whence their “verificationist criterion of meaningfulness”.
realism
In philosophy of science this is the view that we can know that our best scientific theories really refer to unobservable entities that exist independently of our minds.
reductionism
Reductionism is the thesis that the laws and explanations of high level theories in, say, chemistry and biology can be reconstructed entirely in the terms of more fundamental theories in physics.