Talk:Colin Howson

Self-promotion?

Regarding text in bibliography: 'Peter Lipton in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science describes the book as "Delivered with pace and consistent intelligence" and suggests that it "covers a great deal of ground, including Hume's sceptical argument, the new riddle of induction, naturalised epistemology, reliabilism, scientific realism, deductivism, objective chances and Hume on miracles, all from a Bayesian perspective...often provocative and repeatedly enlightening."' Since when do Wikipedia bibliographies include blurbs? Remove as self-promotion? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kronocide (talk • contribs) 22:47, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

The information provided, especially in its current form, to me also seems somewhat dubious. Anyway, a review of Scientific Reasoning can be found here boombaard (talk) 18:33, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

God&Science

To describe "God and Science", debate with Nicholas Beale in Prospect May 1998 pp14-17[4]" as a "trivial item" really is a bit harsh! This was long before The God Delusion and the whole "God is back" and New Atheism had really got going. Neither Colin nor I nor Prospect think it trivial NBeale (talk) 09:37, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Howson's PhD not earned under Lakatos

The article claims Howson "earned his PhD under Imre Lakatos". But Lakatos died in 1973, whereas Howson only earned his PhD in 1981. This historically mistaken claim should therefore be deleted.

Moreover it is also highly doubtful whether Howson would have earned his PhD under Lakatos had he survived to 1981. For Lakatos was strongly opposed to the kind of subjectivist Bayesian probabilist philosophy of probability and of science advocated by Howson. According to Lakatos's anti logical positivist radical fallibilist philosophy of science, all scientific theories/laws are ever false, whereby they all have prior probability zero, and thus also posterior probability zero. But Howson's thesis had no valid arguments against this fallibilist philosophy, even admitting the fallibilist historical fact that all past great scientific theories have turned out to be false, whereby Bayesianism predicts all future theories are likely to be false. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.156.147.180 (talk) 13:10, 31 January 2011 (UTC)