Philip Kitcher

…critique by the Australian philosopher Philip Kitcher, who denied the possibility, in practice and in principle, of any theoretical reduction of the sort envisioned by the logical positivists. In particular, no scientific theory is formalized as a hypothetico-deductive system as the positivists had contended, and there are no genuine “bridge…

…philosophers and social scientists, notably Philip Kitcher, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould, rejected the new sociobiology with scorn. The claims of the sociobiologists were either false or unfalsifiable. Many of their conjectures had no more scientific substance than Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for children, such as How the…