The Issue Of Demarcation : A Philosophical Problem

Mark Christianson identifies three main ideas throughout Stephen Jay Gould’s “the Geometer of Race,” which are; scientists’ theories can never be completely objective, scientists must realize that their scientific theories have a powerful ideological impact on society, and that scientific theories form a “mental geometry” that remains in people’s minds.

While analyzing Kurosawa Akira’s Rashomon in the essay, “Irreconcilable Realities”, Aaron M. Kerner writes, “The substance of the film hinges on what is irreconcilable, and “resolving” the narrative would run contrary to the film’s central concern.” In this quote, Kerner is addressing the fact that the film does not have a conclusion where the audience knows the truth about the characters in the film. Rashomon instead addresses the natures of reality and real life through his filming of this unusual mystery story. He addresses storytelling through the eyes of different characters and shows how the different points of view can have a major impact on the telling of the story. By telling the story this way the film creates a commentary on

With the current state of Scotland, being innocent is not necessarily enough in the eyes of Macbeth.

However, since the personality divisions are not physical, there is no way to prove that they do or do not exist. As a result of the conflicts between the Id, ego and Super Ego, Freud argued that the mind prepared ego defence mechanisms to reduce anxiety. These were Repression, Displacement, Projection, Denial and Intellectualisation. Myers and Brewin provided support for this theory in their study.

The following essay aims to discuss the inconsistencies between the inductivist and Popper’s points of view of science rationality of science in light of claims that the scientific method is inductive yet an inductive method is no. I think is rational to say that inductivist view of science has significant contradiction that Popper’s view solves. To support Popper’s view my argument will introduce the inductivist and falsificationsist views and I will focus in showing the issues of considered science as objective, scientific knowledge as proven and nature as uniform as well as the differences between inductivism and falsificationism to the creation of hypothesis.

In the article, "Science: Conjectures and Refutations", Karl Popper attempts to describe the criteria that a theory must meet for it to be considered scientific. He calls this puzzle the problem of demarcation. Popper summarizes his arguments by saying, "the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability." Kuhn

The Division and Separation of power are essential to keep our societies rulers to have a restriction on their powers. The importance of each on the Australian domestic law especially in relation to the rule of law, and protecting individual rights, and the legal system.

Karl Popper is commonly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science in the 20th Century. He is well known for his rejection of the inductivist viewpoint of the scientific method, in which one uses observation to propose a law to generalize an observed pattern, and later confirm that law through more observation. Popper states that “induction cannot be logically justified” (Popper 14). Inductivism relies on the process of inductive reasoning which is a logical process in which multiple premises, all thought to be true and found to be true most of the time, are combined to obtain a conclusion and in many cases formulate a law or theory. Popper rejected the inductivist viewpoint in favor of a theory called empirical falsification which holds that a theory can never be proven, but it can be falsified, and therefore it can and needs to be scrutinized through experimentation.

The poems written by Emily Dickinson in the late 1800s construes her feelings about the events occurring in her time period through the extensive amounts of work containing a unique poetic language, grammatical characteristics, and cogent meanings. Released a little after the war between the states, the overall tone of these series of poems abides to despair and downbeat, reflecting the war’s miserable times. Emily Dickinson's series of poems provides a different viewpoint of the feelings people perceived during the war. The poem contains an anomalous form of technique in literature that exploits the melancholy mood and tone of the writing. By analyzing the poem’s structure and meaning, it helps illustrates a deep image of the scene

Laudan (1983) claimed that the problem of demarcation can be traced back to ancient Greece and Aristotle. Aristotle asserted that from general laws one can deduce scientific theories that are consequently truthful statements. Pseudoscientific theories according to Aristotle are not deductively formulated and therefore cannot be considered scientific. However this method of demarcation is flawed: pseudosciences such as astrology can be vacuously true and most are reluctant to say astrology is scientific. We can already see from this early stage that the distinctions between science and pseudoscience are murky and the formulation of demarcation can be challenging.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” is a short psychological thriller. The murder of Fortunato haunts Montresor so much that he feels the need to tell the story some fifty years after the fact. He appears to be in the late stages of life desperately trying to remove the stain of murder from his mind. That it is still so fresh and rich in specifics is proof that it has plagued him, “Perhaps the most chilling aspect of reading Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ for the first time is not the gruesome tale that Montresor relates, but the sudden, unpredictable, understated revelation that the murder, recounted in its every lurid detail, occurred not yesterday or last week, but a full fifty years prior to the telling” (DiSanza). The unconscious motivation of Montresor’s to clear his conscience of Fortunato’s murder is proof that he is neither a psychopath nor cold-blooded.

As people, we come with earlier knowledge and understandings on subjects and topics of study, “Science” being one of them. We make presumptions, based on either reasonable evidence or that our thoughts and ideas are known as true by others. Through this we have come to understand and define science as its aims, leaving its definition, whether consciously or unconsciously, unchallenged. We have taken advantage of the label that we have set for science, as well as its goals, and failed to look at them further.

Both Marxist and positivist stress the need for a rigorous scientific method, for scientific analysis of the social phenomenon and natural world.

What is Science? When it comes to the word ‘science’ most of the people have some kind of knowledge about science or when they think of it there is some kind of image related to it, a theory, scientific words or scientific research (Beyond Conservation, n.d.). Many different sorts of ideas float into an individual’s mind. Every individual has a different perception about science and how he/she perceives it. It illustrates that each person can identify science in some form. It indicates that the ‘science’ plays a vital role in our everyday lives (Lederman & Tobin, 2002). It seems that everyone can identify science but cannot differentiate it correctly from pseudo-science and non-science (Park, 1986). This essay will address the difference between science, non-science and pseudo-science. Then it will discuss possible responses to the question that what should we do when there is a clash between scientific explanation and non-scientific explanation. Then it will present a brief examination about the correct non-scientific explanation.

We live in a strange and puzzling world. Despite the exponential growth of knowledge in the past century, we are faced by a baffling multitude of conflicting ideas. The mass of conflicting ideas causes the replacement of knowledge, as one that was previously believed to be true gets replace by new idea. This is accelerated by the rapid development of technology to allow new investigations into knowledge within the areas of human and natural sciences. Knowledge in the human sciences has been replaced for decades as new discoveries by the increased study of humans, and travel has caused the discarding of a vast array of theories. The development of