There seem to be some very good reasons for a philosopher of science to be a deductivist about scientific reasoning. Deductivism is apparently connected with a demand for clarity and definiteness in the reconstruction of scientists’ reasonings. And some philosophers even think that deductivism is the way round the problem of induction. But the deductivist image is challenged by cases of actual ...

If the practice of ethics consists of the justifiable application of moral principles, then the challenge will always be to ensure, first, that the principles are well chosen and, second, that their application to the case in point is overtly justifiable. In this editorial, having briefly mentioned “principlism”, which itself involves the application of ethical principles in practice, we shall ...

Popper famously declared that induction is a myth. This thesis, if true, makes nonsense of the current volume. But is the thesis true? And, before we get to that, what precisely does it mean? Popper is a deductivist. He thinks that whenever we reason, we reason deductively or are best reconstructed as reasoning deductively. Most philosophers disagree. Most philosophers think that most reasoning...

After presenting the current version of principlism, in the process repudiating a widespread deductivist misinterpretation, a fundamental metaethical disagreement is developed by outlining the deductivistic critique of principlism. Once the grounds for this critique have been understood, the dispute between casuistry, deductivism and principlism can be restructured, and the model of "applicatio...

Phylogenetic systematics (the cladistic analysis of phylogenetic relationships) is not hypotheticodeductively structured (in the sense of a covering law model of scientific explanation). If it were, there would be no reason to call for total evidence, since that requirement is automatically satisfied in a deductively structured explanation. Instead, the appeal to the requirement of total eviden...