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Fragmentos da construção histórica do pensamento neo-empirista

The current paper tries to identify the main ideas used in the construction of the neo-empiricist thinking from the world's mechanical view and the Descartes' hypothetical-deductivistic method. The modern inductivistic method is presented by Bacon and the English empiricists collaborate in the question of the thinking afterwards. In the XIXth Century arises the Positivism, which excludes the Metaphysics and considers the explanation of facts only as relations of successions and similities. It is in this scope that is built the experimental method basis. At the beginning of the XXth Century, appears the neo-empiricist science which mains propositions are: (1) the idea of verifiability as a form to confer the theories' veracity from the induction and the probabilities and (2) the continuum and cumulative scientific knowledge increase. Popper presents the impossibility of obtaining huge theories from induction and suggests the substitution of the induction by the deduction and of the verifiability by the falseability. Kuhn argues that the scientific knowledge depends on conventional paradigms and Lakatos explains that science is not just a temporal succession of normal periods and revolutions but its overlapping.

Philosophy of Science; Epistemology; Neo-empiricism; History of Science; Paradigm


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