Laudan, Larry - Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence

This is a book about a few key problems in the philosophy of science. To explain why it has the structure that it does, I need to say something very briefly about my odyssey in philosophy. I came of age philosophically toward the end of the heyday of logical empiricism. My early views grew out of a conviction that the positivists had mistaken ideas both about the agenda for philosophy and about the solutions to certain prominent problems. For instance, the axiomatic reformulation of scientific theories, the premium put on getting at the precise structure of scientific explanation, and the multiplication of formal theories of empirical support all struck me then, as they strike me now, as misplaced emphases.