Metatheory of Science: Anti-Realism, Uniformitarianism, Scientism, Verificationism, Scientific Realism, Black Swan Theory, Confirmation Holism

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 21. Chapters: Anti-realism, Uniformitarianism, Scientism, Verificationism, Scientific realism, Black swan theory, Confirmation holism, Instrumentalism, Conventionalism, Scientific formalism, Constructive empiricism, Postpositivism, Inductivism, Naive empiricism, Inductionism. Excerpt: In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the key to the past" and functioning at the same rates. Uniformitarianism has been a key principle of geology, but naturalism's modern geologists, while accepting that geology has occurred across deep time, no longer hold to a strict gradualism. Uniformitarianism was formulated by Scottish naturalists in the late 18th century, starting with the work of the geologist James Hutton, which was refined by John Playfair and popularised by Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology in 1830. The term uniformitarianism was coined by William Whewell, who also coined the term catastrophism for the idea that the Earth was shaped by a series of sudden, short-lived, violent events. Hutton's Unconformity at Jedburgh. A photograph shows the current scene (2003), below John Clerk of Eldin's illustration of 1787. Cliff at the east of Siccar Point showing the near-horizontal red sandstone layers above vertically tilted greywacke rocks.The earlier conceptions likely had little influence on 18th century European geological explanations for the formation of the Earth. Abraham Gottlob Werner proposed Neptunism where strata were deposits from shrinking seas precipitated onto primordial rocks such as granite. In 1785 James Hutton proposed an opposing, self-maintaining infinite cycle based on...