Chapter One Flashcards
Empirical
Based on experience.
Authority
Based on someone else’s knowledge.
Logic
Based on inductive and deductive reasoning.
Intuition
Spontaneous perception or judgement not based on reasoned mental steps.
Common Sense
Practical intelligence shared by a group of people.
Counterintuitive
Something that goes against common sense.
Science
A way of obtaining knowledge by means of objective observations.
Parsimony
Using the simplest possible explanation.
Realism
The philosophy that objects perceived have an existence outside of the mind.
Rationality
A view that reasoning has the basis in solving problems.
Regularity
A belief that phenomena exist in recurring patterns that conform with universal laws.
Discoverability
The belief that it is possible to to learn solutions to the questions posed.
Determinism
The doctrine that all events happen because of preceding causes.
Temporal precedence
Something that occurs prior to another thing.
co variation of cause and effect
When the cause is introduced the effect occurs.
Probabilistic co-variation
Statistical association of cause and effect.
Elimination of alternative explanations
No explanation for an effect other than the purported cause is possible.
Law
A statement that certain events are regularly associated with each other in an orderly way.
Theory
A statement, or set of statements that explain one or more laws, usually including one indirect statement explaining the relationship.
Falsifiability
The property of a good theory that it is capable of disproof.
Hypothesis
A statement assumed to be true for the purpose of testing its validity.
Operationism
A view that scientific concepts must be defined in terms of observable operations.
Operational definition
a statement of the precise meaning of a procedure or concept of an experiment.
Converging operations
Using different operational definitions to arrive at the definition of a concept.
