- Approximate truth(as used in philosophy of science)
- When a theory is mostly correct or close to being correct, even if it's not completely accurate in every detail.
- Boyd(as a key Cornell realist philosopher)
- Richard Boyd, a philosopher who argues that moral properties like 'goodness' are actually natural properties we can discover, similar to how scientists discover facts about chemistry.
- Epistemically self-undermining(as a criticism of underdetermination as a theory)
- When a philosophical idea defeats itself by logic—if the idea is true, it proves itself wrong or makes no sense.
- Mature scientific theories(as the type of theory being discussed)
- Well-developed, thoroughly tested scientific theories that have been refined over time (like the theory of evolution or gravity), rather than young or speculative ideas.
- Putnam
- # Putnam
"Putnam" most commonly refers to **Hilary Putnam** (1926-2016), an influential American philosopher who made major contributions to philosophy of mind, language, and science. He is famous for thought experiments like the "brain in a vat" scenario, which explores questions about reality and how we know what's real. His work fundamentally changed how philosophers think about the relationship between our minds, language, and the external world.
- Radical underdetermination(as a challenge to scientific knowledge)
- The philosophical problem that many completely different theories could all explain the same observations equally well, so we can't be sure which one is actually true based on evidence alone.
- epistemology(Contrasted with purely descriptive scientific inquiry)
- A normative enterprise that tells us how we ought to reason from evidence and how we ought to justify our beliefs, as distinct from merely describing how we do reason or justify beliefs
- predictive success(Second root of virtuous predictivism)
- The empirical demonstration that the entailed consequence N is true