David Miller (philosopher)
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- For other people named David Miller, see David Miller (disambiguation)
David W. Miller (born 19 August 1942) is a philosopher and prominent exponent of critical rationalism. He teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK.
In 1964 he went to the London School of Economics as a student to study Logic and Scientific Method. Soon afterwards he became one of Karl Popper's research assistants. In a series of papers in the 1970s, Miller and others uncovered defects in Popper's formal definition of verisimilitude, previously a mostly ignored aspect of Popper's theory. A substantial literature developed in the two decades following, including papers by Miller, to assess the remediablility of Popper's approach.
Miller's Critical Rationalism (1994) is an attempt to expound, defend, and extend an approach to scientific knowledge identified with Popper. A central, "not quite original", thesis is that rationality does not depend on good reasons. Rather, it is better off without them, especially as they are unobtainable and unusable. Logical technical notes are at the ends of chapters. Three later chapters use elementary probability or algebra.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- David Miller, Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence, 1994, ISBN 0-8126-9198-9
- ____, Out Of Error: Further Essays On Critical Rationalism, 2006 ISBN 0-7546-5068-5
[edit] External links
- Probability, Knowledge and Verisimilitude section of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article
- David Miller, "Being an Absolute Skeptic," Science, June 4, 1999
- David Miller's homepage at the University of Warwick, including links to book descriptions
