Philosophy of Research

Most of the knowledge that we call science has been generated during the past 500 years. It took a long while to determine how the world is better investigated. One earlier method was to just talk about it or argue as old philosophers did. To cite an example, Aristotle, one of the great Greek philosophers, believed that women have fewer teeth than men have, and provided long arguments in support of his belief. If he had bothered to count the teeth of any one of his wives, he would not have committed this ‘deductive blunder’! This kind of logic is unreliable. Simple arguments will not prove anything. To ascertain whether a statement is correct, it requires proofs.