...ike Carl Hempel and Ernest Nagel regard a theory as scientific if it is hypothetico-deductive. To them, scientific theories are sets of inter-relate... ...r-related because a minimum number of axioms and hypotheses yield, in an inexorable deductive sequence, everything else known in the field the theor... ...ith breadth, width, and profundity, such as Darwin's theory of evolution - are not deductively integrated and are very difficult to test (falsify) ... ... scientific activity. Alleged connections that cannot be captured in these nets of reasoning are cast out either as "hypothetical" or as "false". I... ...erse is partial to life, not indifferent to it. All four are forms of teleological reasoning (that nature has a purpose) masquerading as eutaxiolog... ...ical accounts are possible. What happens when we try to apply the same teleological reasoning to the system as a whole, to the Universe itself? In t... ...h as the electron or dark matter) derive their meaning from their place in complex deductive systems of empirically-testable theorems. Ethicists re... ... have been the first to offer this simplistic formulation of the Logical (a-priori, deductive) Problem of Evil, later expounded on by David Hume in ...

...hat I could ever feel any curiosity about my first attempts at writing and reasoning. My father encour aged me in this useful amusement, though, as I... ...ogues ; and I was rather recalcitrant to my father’s criticisms of the bad reasoning respecting the first principles of physics, which abounds in the ... ...sup port the opposite conclusion, scarcely even attempting to confute the reasonings of their antagonists; and, therefore, at the utmost, leaving the... ... was the chap ter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like “law of natu... ... when combined. I then asked myself, what is the ultimate analysis of this deductive process; the com mon theory of the syllogism evidently throwing ... ...spect to the philoso phy of politics. I now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the... ...ce when separate. 93 John Stuart Mill It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were ... ...erimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the ty... ...y leading conception for which I am indebted to him is that of the Inverse Deductive Method, as the one chiefly applicable to the complicated subjects...