This book began life as a series of lectures given at Oxford. Subsequent versions evolved through lectures given at the universities of Aarhus, Malaysia, Nijmegen, Oslo and the Inter-University Centre for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik. I am thankful for the constructive criticism of those who attended these lectures. I would like to have been able to benefit from the comments of my Czechoslovakian colleagues on Chapter I, and hope that this will one day be possible. In the meantime my thoughts are with those colleagues whose work on Philosophy in most difficult circumstances is an inspiration. Without the opportunity of having sabbatical leave in Hilary Term 1980 I would not have been able to produce the final version and I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Balliol College for having made that possible. During this time I was a visitor at the Institute of Philosophy, Nijmegen University, and I wish to thank the members of the Institute for their hospitality, particularly Professor A.A.Derksen, whose careful and penetrating criticisms saved me from many an error.
In the course of this book Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos are severely criticized. No one should assume that I wish to belittle their achievements. I have learned more from their work about the nature of science than from any other source, with the exception of Hilary Putnam’s writings. We are fortunate to have (and, in Lakatos, sadly to have had) such lively, forceful and provocative articulations of varying perspectives on the scientific enterprise. Their writings have given form to the most important contemporary questions about science.
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