David William Miller (19 August 1942 in Watford – 20 November 2024[1]) was an English philosopher and prominent exponent of critical rationalism.[2] He taught in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK,[3] where he was a Reader in Philosophy. He had been an Honorary Treasurer of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
He was educated at Woodbridge School[citation needed] and Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1964 he began to study logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics. Soon afterwards he became one of Karl Popper's research assistants.[4][5] In a series of papers in the 1970s, Miller and others uncovered defects in Popper's formal definition of verisimilitude, previously a mostly ignored aspect of Popper's theory. A substantial literature developed in the two decades following, including papers by Miller, to assess the remediability of Popper's approach.
Miller's Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence[2] is an attempt to expound, defend, and extend an approach to scientific knowledge identified with Popper. A central, "not quite original", thesis is that rationality does not depend on good reasons. Rather, it is better off without them, especially as they are unobtainable and unusable.[6]
Books by David Miller
- Croquet and How to Play It with Rupert Thorp, 1966
- Popper Selections, 1985
- Critical Rationalism: A Restatement and Defence, 1994
- Out of Error: Further Essays on Critical Rationalism, 2006
See also
References
- ↑ https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/news/?newsItem=8ac672c49367eb1601936d1988290e22
- 1 2 Miller, David W. (1994). Critical rationalism: a restatement and defence. La Salle, Ill: Open Court. ISBN 0-8126-9198-9 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "University of Warwick | Philosophy | Associates | David Miller". Archived from the original on 7 November 2017. Retrieved 6 November 2017.
- ↑ Miller, D. (1997). "Sir Karl Raimund Popper, C. H., F. B. A. 28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994.: Elected F.R.S. 1976". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 43: 369–409. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1997.0021.
- ↑ Miller, David W. (2006). Out of error: further essays on critical rationalism. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate. ISBN 0-7546-5068-5.
- ↑ Miller, D. (1999). "Being an Absolute Skeptic". Science. 284 (5420): 1625–1626. Bibcode:1999Sci...284.1625M. doi:10.1126/science.284.5420.1625. S2CID 170982916.
External links
- Probability, Knowledge and Verisimilitude section of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Karl Popper
- David Miller's Homepage at University of Warwick
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