Human Knowledge - 9780415474443

Famed British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) spent much of his career seeking to engage the general public in the concerns of philosophy. In this work, first published in 1948, he introduced this audience to his thoughts on the problem of non-demonstrative inference, or how is it that we can accept scientific knowledge through inference. In endeavoring to describe the minimal principles required to justify scientific inferences, he deals with preliminaries concerning the nature of science and language; shows the necessity of inference to the scientific endeavor; analyzes such fundamental concepts of the inferred scientific world as physical space, historical time, and causal laws; explores the implications of scientific inference in terms of probability; and only then lays out his principle justification for scientific inference, which is based on the assumption that "when an event having a complex space-time structure occurs, it frequently happens that it is one of a train of events having the same or a very similar structure." Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)